2020 Presidential Primaries

I stand corrected.

You all keep voting for your lesser evils, and watch as we sink from evil to evil convincing yourselves that the next one's going to be much better and we can start to fix our problems which always seem to be just out of reach this time around. We live in an imperialist system (as do you), and tens of thousands of people whose faces are never seen die every year to keep this system running. You call it working fine, I call it exploitation. You call me a child but you understand so little and hide your face from the reality that we live in a system designed to keep the classes separated so that the wealthy stay wealthy, and the poor stay poor.

You get defensive, but you know the system you're a part of needs blood to lubricate its gears. You've come to accept that as part of the contract, that the poor will just need to keep working so you can have a few more creature comforts. The system works, it works, you say to yourself, because if you acknowledged that it didn't work you'd have to change, you'd have to realize that you are killing your fellow human beings, that you are raping the environment, that the people who tell you everything is fine are exploiting massive resources, from your good will and trust on down to the metals being dug up from the earth, in order to keep you distracted.

So election season comes around, you make your little vote for your representatives, and then you feel like you've done the adult thing, the responsible thing, and so the men, women, and children who are crushed under your country's monstrous and gluttonous needs will just have to die.

It shows just how little you actually understand in the grand scheme of things. The system is designed to exclude leftists, because we want to either wholly reform or abolish that system of inequality. If you think the people in power (the real ones, not the ones who help you choose which party is your best friend) would let that happen via the ballot box, then you're more of a fool than you let on.

Meanwhile, some idiot is circulating a petition on FB to "ban all vote-by-mail" because Reasons.

It's harder to cheat when there's a paper trail. When one can't hide behind closed source voting machines, hanging chads, and the ever present technical difficulties that arise from precinct to precinct as millions of people cram into single buildings in 12 hours on a work day to cast their "so very important" and "essential to our democracy" vote, then it becomes clear that a simpler system would only cause more trouble by actually allowing some of those folks who can't seem to get their voices heard to maybe have that opportunity. Vote by mail enables many people who can't just up and vote at the drop of a hat, and often those people are the disadvantaged and vulnerable.

(I know you know this, I'm just elaborating on it).

If there is doubt that the system works based on how many people it can disenfranchise, then just look at the U.S. voting system and ask why all of the inequalities, and why after decades the supposed opposition (whomever it may be) never seems to do anything about it when they get the chance.

The idiot in question is someone I went to high school with. She's a staunch believer in Thoughts'n'Prayers and is convinced if you vote by mail the "illegals" working in the post office will intercept it and change your vote.

I am sorry. Genuinely. I know a few people like that, too. One very conservative guy I know from school believes that people are being told to wear masks so they suffocate and have brain damage, making them more susceptible to government authority. I swear, if I had my druthers, school would consist of math, science, world history, literature, basic economics (like how to balance your ledgers, how credit cards actually work, what payday loans are and how to avoid them), music, art, social outreach, and critical thinking. Yeah, I'd like a class dedicated solely to getting children to think critically, to question what they know and what they think they know. We could offer night classes for adults.

What I'm saying is that we're kind of fucked, aren't we?

All the GOP gerrymandering and voter restriction attempts and you can still spout this bullshit with a straight face?

Well of course. Why else do you think Clinton and Obama and Biden put them there?

Though obviously they only change your vote if you voted the wrong way...


Now where did I put that tinfoil hat of mine?

How do you know voting by mail works? The U.S. military's done it since the Civil War.

I don't think Lanz is a fan of GOP gerrymandering and voter restrictions, either. But he can correct me if I'm wrong about that.

Does she know the post office requires lots of citizenship tests? It is not like working at Mar a lago. You actually have to have Birth certificates and social security cards to get hired there.

I heard that excuse in a couple of places. I would think that if masks caused brain damage the scientists and doctors who wear them regularly would probably not do that. Do we really need to get into the size of O2 and CO2 molecules compared to the weave of the masks when the smartest people in our society regularly wear them to perform hours of surgery and don't suffer detrimental effects from oxygen deprivation.

Maybe it is just that people with very few brain cells have to be really worried about losing the few they have. I would not know such troubles. I am also pretty sure bleach, disinfectants, and UV light are also things that can destroy your brain cells, but none of them are bothered that they were told to use them inside their bodies by glorious leader.

I am beginning to realize the villain in My Hero Acedemia who has the hand on his face was probably subjected to many years of listening to trumpublicans speak and that is why he just has a dismembered hand on his face all the time, and hates everybody.

At a guess, she'd consider that Fake News.

Or that sort of person would just rather hate so much they would ignore reality.

No, I am not a fan. I've said multiple times that voting districts should be drawn by algorithm, based on nothing but population and geometry. There should be no such thing as a "safe" district. But the arguments put out by people like Amaris and Nova are basically "the wrong person won, so we must change things so that my preferred candidates always win."

No, the argument seems to be that the idea of someone having more or less say in who the president should be based on their home address is BS.

That's a whole lot of words just to say "change isn't simple or easy, so I'm not gonna bother."

Apparently not enough words if that's what you think I'm advocating. I didn't say don't bother, quite the opposite. Voting one or twice every 4-6 years IS the minimum effort, and people barely engage in that, let alone what I do which is community outreach, mutual aid programs, co-ops, supporting union organizations, engaging in both individual and collective acts of charity, and a lot more than that.

That you see an election as the only way to change the course of things should tell you quite a lot about why nothing seems to be changing except for the worst. In a more egalitarian system, elections would be a straightforward, effective process for positive change, but we don't live in that system, and the system we're in is explicitly designed to prevent that kind of change. If you disagree, then next election vote to put the poor and needy in power. Surely you've thought of that before now, correct? If you have, then you know why it wouldn't work. The system I'm in, the one you're in, they're not designed for the vulnerable and disadvantaged, they're designed to secure the possessions and power of those who already have massive resources. You and I? We're the dregs, and some of us more so than others.

For the U.S. it has long been that way, but it was like that from the start. Our founding fathers said all men were created equal, but only white landowning men could vote, and slavery was still legal. Can you imagine the temerity of a person to say "all men are created equal" and then going home to their plantations filled with enslaved black men and women?

After 200 years, white landowning men are still the most powerful forces of change, and since they don't want change (except that which benefits them directly), we continue to fight for the barest scraps through a system they have retooled for their own ends, but the slavery still exists, it's just changed forms enough to appear as a valid extension of the society in which we live rather than the chains we wear (willingly to our ignorance) in order to scratch out a subsistence.

You cannot use the master's tools to build a new house, because the master's tools are designed to only work one way. You have to think outside the box, to create new ways to change things, instead of relying on a system that says in time you might have something come your way, but even then you'll be aware it's only to keep you compliant.

That's it, keep justifying doing nothing. Whatever helps you sleep at night.

I'm not the one advocating people vote for a rapist while pretending to justify it. I don't sleep well, but that's because of the responsibilities I shoulder. How you sleep is your own affair.

Ironically, the problems that have been reported with voting by mail mostly have to do with Republican county clerks coming up with bogus excuses for rejecting people's ballots.

Yes, we should totally have a handful of urban areas determine our national politics. That'd be fair, by golly.

California becomes first state to switch November election to all-mail balloting


Which of our resident cognitive dysfunctionals will be the first to post "Oh, sure, so all the illegals can vote!"?

Not a believer in one person/one vote, eh?

If my house has one voter in it and my neighbor's house has two, should each of the people in my neighbor's house have the power of their vote cut in half so that their household can't outvote mine?

Is it fair for some people's votes to count more than others just because they live in a particular place?

No, I'm not. Representative democracy, not direct democracy. Under one person one vote, 51% of the population can take away 100% of your rights.

And with representative democracy, the percentage of the population required to take 100% your rights away is considerably lower, if they happen to live in rural areas.

You think that's better?

I know that we should hope for the best with vote-by-mail, and that actual experience has not documented any problems.

That said, if we ignore the source, it is not unreasonable to think that when vote-by-mail happens on an unprecedented scale, shenanigans will happen. Some people won't have ballots delivered, some will have ballots intercepted, some people will round up ballots of various people vote for them, some people will more easily buy and sell votes, etc.

Is there a better answer against the backdrop of the pandemic? No. But having some level of concern for these types of issues doesn't seem farfetched, even if at least part of the concern is masking the real concern that it takes away voter suppression as a weapon.

Much better to have a system where 40% of the population can take away 100% of your rights.