#i voted because I'm not an idiot

[crazy-pages]

You know what, 6 years and even more studying of Marx and Marxism later, especially Marxist Communism, I have more to add that I think is relevant now.

Accelerationism and denying systems of power legitimacy by not participating don't work and Marxists are the clearest example of this you will ever find. Not a single goddamn thing they did to incite or lay the groundwork for any revolution ever moved the needle a millimeter.

Marxist philosophy is that what immersiration is what causes revolution. This is based on Marx's observations of European populations that were freed from monarchy or had its powers drastically curtailed, had a quality of life explosion led by a growing bourgeosie (capital owners and profiteers of labor), and then were repressed and immiserated by a reactionary backlash (which the bourgeoisie both sided with, against, and tried to ignore). Lower class workers and sometimes peasants in those conditions revolted consistently, backing the bourgeoisie in the process.

Now Marx thought this is because the workees were still sheep without revolutionary class consciousness, simply obeying blindly the nearest authority figure. What Marx missed is that these quality of life explosions were caused by local organizations that tangibly brought quality of life improvements through collective action within the existing systems of power. Guilds, small business, worker's combinations (old school unions, and damn Marx hated unions), new political parties, social clubs, newspapers (which involved a lot of political organizing)! People didn't just know life after the reactionary wave sucked. They didn't just know for a fact it could be better. They knew, up close and personal, that their small scale collective action through joint organization could be the cause of that improvement. So when the reactionary wave hit in the 1840s, there's a reason a thousand damn revolutionary secret societies sprung up. They were just all the same collective action groups, transitioning seamlessly from public action for self-enrichment* to covert action against the state. Because they knew already, for a fact, that they could move the needle with collective organizing!

*Self enrichment here can mean stuff like guild monopolies and throwing their weight around, but it can also mean combinations/ unions striking for better wages and working conditions. Marx fucking *hated* this, despised it, and Russia's Marxist Communists did too. Especially Lenin's crowd, the Mensheviks might begrudingly cooperate with a union once in a while, but the Bolsheviks rejected them outright.

This is because the premise of Marxism is that immersiration creates revolution, and advocating for better wages and working conditions reduces motivation to revolt. So cooperating with unions fighting for living wages and not getting their arms chewed up in machinery and not sleeping 10 people to a room in tenements becomes somehow counterrevolutionary. But it's not about motivation through misery, it never has been!

What drives revolutionary zeal is knowing for a fact that your collective action can work. That you can in fact make your life better by sticking your neck out. It's why the groups that actually triggered the Russian Revolution had fuck all to do with Communism. It was workplace soviets revolting during the urban famine of WWI (the outgrowth of the very unionizing activity that the Communists rejected). It was Christian mutual aid organizations in the cities (that Marxism rejected as the opiate of the masses) that actually triggered the protests which turned violent and destabilized the Tsarist regime.

It was Revolutionary Socialists who actually participated in unionization activity and the Zemtsvos (deeply ineffectual fake parliament the Tsar made to pacify people) who formed the political backbone after the successful revolution (though Lenin cooperated with the furthest left of the to coup the rest, and then couped them in turn, before the democratic constitutional convention they set up could happen). Because it didn't matter that revolutionary socialist activity didn't actually fix the Tsarist regime or that the Zemstvo's barely did more than bandaid problems. Because when the time came and shit was destabilized by the world war and hitting the fan, people knew something about the revolutionary socialists. They knew that they showed up and did some goddamn work on the behalf of laborers and peasants, and that they successfully won quality of life improvements through the political process, even when they were marginal ones.

Meanwhile the Marxists tried multiple times to "go to the people" and just like. Go to the peasants and preach Marxist philosophy at them. And the best result that ever got was indifference, most of the time it got them turned in to the Okhrana (plainclothes police). It wasn't that the peasants weren't fucking miserable and suffering, but you can't just tell somebody that they should trust you with the ideology and practicalities of a state annihilating revolution without some bonafides! Like. At least one (1) single example of actually helping people! Just one!

Meanwhile the Marxist opted out of participating in the Zemstvos on ideological grounds and because they believed there was no path through them to revolution or overthrowing the Tsar. And they weren't wrong about that, but they were missing the whole damn point of participating in a process like that. Which is that the point is earning faith.

And this is a lesson which, in the United States, both the Democratic party establishment and radically leftist people who refuse to participate in politics have both failed to learn, to our disaster.

Anti-political leftists don't realize that you can't accelerate your way into a revolution like Marx imagined he was seeing. You need extensive and thoroughly spread out organizations which have been participating within existing power structures to benefit people's lives, if you're going to have the organizational infrastructure and the bona fides to actually coordinate radical action.

And the Democratic establishment seems to have forgotten that you need to actually do shit that improves people's lives and champion popular policies to motivate people* to earn trust. It is a sad and frustrating quirk of human risk tolerance and cognitive avoidance and learned helplessness that we are just not good at motivating ourselves or others to put in effort to achieve a lesser circumstance over a much worse circumstance. I don't know, maybe it has something to do with our evolutionary origins and a need to conserve energy and not experiment with new things when times got lean. Maybe it's got nothing to do with that. But it's how people work.

*Also, and this is the key thing, that's not enough. The point of improving people's lives even in narrow or isolated ways as the world gets worse (aside from basic decency), the way unionization and Christian mutual aid and revolutionary socialism did in declining Tsarist Russia, is building trust.

A unionizing textile factory in Russia might have still seen the poverty of the villages they sent money back to worsen faster than their wages improved, but they knew that was beyond the union's control. The act of improving wages, even when it wasn't enough, produced organizing trust because other negative factors beyond working conditions were self evidentally beyond the control of the union.

But when the Democratic party makes small tweaks to state interest rates to get a grip on inflation, it doesn't really matter for trust that they objectively handled it better than the Republicans would have. What people want to know is why they can't set the food prices back to what they were, rather than just stopping the runaway inflation. Democratic voters want to know why they can't criminally punished price gouging CEOs, they want to know why they can't break up monopolies. And then when liberal outlets platform a long chain of pundits who one after the other explain that the solution is actually to increase unemployment and that a little pain is good for the economy and that the problem is people are getting too entitled higher wages, with no pushback from Democratic leadership and enthusiastic endorsement from the treasury officials Biden appointed...

The same actions which build trust and faith in small institutions, marginal improvements and levee building which help with one thing even as stuff gets worse in general? They don't help when you're the establishment. They don't build trust, they erode it. When people believe that a party is on the side of the corporations who just tore their stomach open to get their wallet, it doesn't matter that they made it gentler and forced those corporations to leave a few bills behind. That doesn't build trust.

The Democrats thought that so long as they held true to those few marginally life improving things in the infrastructure bill they passed, they could get away with pivoting hard right to capture conservative voters on issues like the destruction of Palestine, and racist immigration laws, and capitalist enablement. But they forgot that the point of those marginal life improvements, politically speaking, is building trust. You can't erode trust by going full warhawk in the Middle East on the back of the biggest student anti-war protests in generations and expect for students in college towns in Michigan to trust you. You can't pursue immigration racism so extreme it would have made the Bush Administration blush and expect people who care about racism to trust you.

Small d democratic politics, both revolutionary and establishment, lives and dies on establishing trust in collective organization. Accelerationism and non-participation don't achieve that.

(Sadly, conservative politics, both reactionary and establishment, live and die on establishing trust in the validity of authority, hierarchal or institutional or individual. And it takes a lot less evidence-based improving of people's lives to do that.)

Chris Hedges on America entering the “Trump Phase” of late capitalism

[contagious-watermelon]

Why do I keep seeing transmascs and trans men insisting or implying that all trans men are "female socialized," or "understand the female experience," or "navigated the world as a woman." Because yeah, sure, that can be true for some people. especially if you weren't gnc at all as a kid and didn't crack your egg until well into adulthood, it makes sense.

But they don't stop at saying they had that experience. It always comes with an addendum that trans men, as a group, all can relate to this experience. I don't know about the entirety of my demographic, but I never got even a little bit of what some of them talk about. I didn't even believe that women were scared of going out at night until I kept consistently seeing them say it, online or wherever, for years. I never realized catcalling was a thing until I saw some women complaining about it on reddit.

But they posit it as some sort of, you're safer than cis men, right? You know what it's like? Which, on top of being patently, demonstrably false in the case of myself and many other trans men, holds some unpleasant and often outright hostile implications about trans women. And they always deny it, but if you can't even conceptualize someone like me who grew up gnc, and never got the bulk (or any?) of whatever we consider to be 'female socialization,' what does that say about what you think trans girls went through, growing up? I don't want to speak for them, as I've never experienced that firsthand, but I can guarantee that (if you're even a little bit obviously trans) people don't treat you like a cis kid of the opposite gender. By and large, they don't get treated like cis boys.

It just makes me mad that we're taking this inaccurate framework that (ever so conveniently) puts trans people into the box of our assumed birth gender, and trying to fancy it up and use it with a faux-progressive veneer; never mind the way that transphobes use it to bar trans women from being athletes, or using the bathroom, or having access to any gendered resources they need. It would be bad enough to try and dust it off and use it even if it were largely accurate, due to the aforementioned connections to outright transphobia, but it literally is patently false. Not in all cases, obviously, but why are we trying to revamp this untrue, inaccurate generalization and pretend that we can make it 'trans-inclusive?'

[threewaysdivided]

Gaza is NOT an excuse to sit out this election

I don't usually post about politics on this blog (if anything I try to avoid it since I know it can be a distressing topic) but, to be honest, the upcoming U.S. presidential election has me concerned.

This is going to be one of, if not THE most globally consequential election of our time, and I have been deeply perturbed to see people spreading sentiment that sitting this vote out (or even voting for Trump) is justified by the Democratic Party's handling of the genocide in Gaza.

I was going to write a post about why I think that's really dangerous and irresponsible rhetoric, but then U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders came out and said the same things far better so I'm going to share his video, and some key quotes:

"SOME of you are saying: "How can I vote for Kamala Harris if she is supporting this terrible war?" And that is a very fair question. And let me give you my best answer. AND that is that, even on this issue, Donald Trump and his right-wing friends are worse. In the Senate, in Congress, the Republicans have worked overtime to block humanitarian aid to the starving children in Gaza. [Current President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris] support getting as much humanitarian aid into Gaza as soon as possible. TRUMP has said Netanyahu is "doing a good job." And has said Biden is holding him back. [Trump] has suggested that the Gaza Strip would make excellent beachfront property for development. [...] AFTER Kamala wins, we will together do everything we can to change U.S. policy towards Netanyahu: An immediate ceasefire, the return of all hostages, a surge of massive humanitarian aid, the stopping of settler attacks on the West Bank, and the rebuilding of Gaza for the Palestinian people. AND let me be clear: We will have, in my view, a much better chance of changing U.S. policy with [Kamala Harris] than with [Donald Trump], who is extremely close to Netanyahu and sees him as a like-minded, right-wing extremist ally. [...] AS important as Gaza is [...] it is not the only issue at stake in this election. IF Trump wins, women in this country will suffer an enormous setback and lose the ability to control their own bodies. [...] IF Trump wins, to be honest with you, the struggle against climate change is over. [...] Trump believes [climate change] is a hoax. And if the United States, the largest economy in the world, stops transforming our energy system away from fossil fuel, every other country, China, Europe, all over the world, they will do exactly the same thing. And God only knows the kind of planet we will leave to our kids and future generations."

And now I am going to editorialise a few more points:

Firstly, I want to emphasise that the upcoming election is about damage control and harm reduction, not about political allegiance or moral purity. The point of casting your vote is not to signal support for a candidate, but to cancel out a vote for the more damaging candidate by voting for their opposition in the two party system. Let me be clear on that: under the U.S.'s current first-past-the-post voting arrangement, voting for a minor third party or independent is functionally useless during an election of this magnitude. It is a symbolic gesture that's functionally and morally equivalent to sitting out.

Story time: I come from a country which uses a preferential ranked-choice system and where voting is compulsory for all eligible citizens (a system which lowers campaign costs, incentivizes governments to make voting more accessible country-wide and limits attempts at voter suppression not that right-wing parties haven't tried). Despite us actually having a few substantial progressive third parties, there have been several times where I've sucked it up and voted for the major centrist party specifically to keep the major conservative right-wing party from gaining or maintaining power. We call this vote-them-out and keep-them-out politics - it's pretty much the default approach here, and it should be yours too because the idea of a "perfect party" is a fallacy. When human rights are on the line, pick the least-worst major option. The aim is to cancel out a vote for the other guy. Even with this, we recently lost our state to the major conservative-right party (running on a platform of youth-criminalization and abortion-bans) by a mere 8 percent margin - just in case you want evidence of how much impact a small number of votes can make, and how dangerous it can be to get complacent.

Secondly, for those Americans who still believe that not voting will keep you from being complicit in the Genocide in Gaza. Let me speak to you as a White Australian: you are already complicit in and benefiting from a genocide. Multiple, in fact. You and I both live, learn, work and profit on land that was forcibly seized through the murder and dispossession of First Nations peoples, similar to how Palestinians are being murdered and dispossessed of their land right now. When you enjoy chocolate and vanilla, you are benefiting from spices that were brought to the Global West via the colonization of Latin America, and that were historically (and in chocolate's case still is) cultivated by enslaved people. The phone/tablet/computer you are reading this post on is likely made using conflict minerals. I'm sorry, but you don't get to wring your hands over Gaza at a distance and pretend that sitting this vote out absolves you of genocide, while ignoring the ones your (and my) ancestors committed to bring you that luxury. You just don't. And again, as Senator Sanders said, Trump wants to bulldoze Gaza and turn it into Netanyahu's beachfront property development. You don't get to pretend that standing aside and knowingly letting someone else vote for him to do that is the more moral option.

Thirdly I want to point to that last part that I highlighted in Senator Sander's speech. I am not a USAmerican, but this election scares me because of America's global impact. If you are an American voter reading this, you need to understand that your country is too globally influential for you to neglect your civic responsibilities. I was working as a member of my country's national public service under a right-wing government during the Trump era and things got bad. A woman was raped inside Parliament House, video emerged of male staffers masturbating on female colleagues' desks and our then-Prime Minister quipped that it was a "triumph of democracy" that the women who marched in protest weren't "met with bullets". There was the same sort of culture-war mismanagement and misinformation about COVID-19, there were Neo-Nazis, and there was a failure to properly condemn or correct either of those things. Progress towards sustainability and clean energy slowed, and our Prime Minister secretly tried to seize personal control over five separate government departments. Sure, some of that would have happened with or without a Trump administration after all, we didn't need a Republican U.S. President to produce an onion-eating misogynist who hates homosexuals despite his own sister being one but the rest of the world looks to the U.S. to set the tone on what is acceptable in government. When the largest country votes in (or sits aside and lets other people vote in) someone as egocentric, openly prejudiced, corrupt, anti-science, greed-motivated, war-hungry, and dictatorially-minded as Donald Trump, it signals to other leaders that that is the acceptable standard. Even when it's absolutely not. When you choose to sit out (or cast a meaningless symbolic vote) rather than effectively use your civic power as a U.S. citizen, the outcome affects millions of global citizens who never had the option of giving their input.

Finally, I want you to listen to this podcast by Dr Robin DiAngelo and think about what the choice to waste your vote signals to the people around you. To the members of your community who are women, BIPOC, LGBT+, disabled, have migrant parents or who live countries that are effected by American policy (which is all of them, by the way. Y'all are big). We are not asking much from you. Queue for a slightly-annoying amount of time, get your identity confirmed at a sign-in table and then cast a ballot. Tick a box that indicates you'd rather let a qualified centre-left attorney and former senator have a chance of improving things, instead of a dictator-lionizing convicted felon who openly wants dismantle voting systems so that he'll never lose again. That's it. Get yourself to a polling booth and tick a box. We are not asking you to make an effort. We are not asking you to volunteer. We are not asking you run petitions, or call representatives or donate money or do meal deliveries or any kind of community work. Just tick a box. Vote. Anonymously. No one even needs to know what box you ticked.

If that is too much to ask of you, then what right do you have to call yourself any kind of ally? Think about the enormous privilege you are displaying by deciding that you can neglect this, and the fragility you are showing by deciding that a simple anonymous vote is too morally taxing. What reason would we have to ever believe you'd help us compromise on future solutions when you've shown you'd rather throw away possibly the last meaningful vote you may ever get on a Nirvana Fallacy? Why would we ever believe that we could rely on you to help or defend us when you couldn't even work up the courage and stamina to tick a box?

If that's too much for you, then fine. You're a coward, but fine. Just don't pretend to be anything else. And certainly don't hide behind the actual, ongoing suffering of real people as justification for your civic negligence. Do not use Gaza as an excuse to sit out this November 5th.

This website provides information on how to check your registration, register if you haven't, and find a polling booth. So does this one.

Do your duty. Get yourself ready. Go vote.

Then buy yourself some ethical chocolate to wash the bad taste out of your mouth.

[jaythelay]

You Are In Fact Demanding Tyranny by telling people Protesting or Demanding Better will Cause Us To Be Hurt or to Lose.

We can hate Trump and be anti-genocide and I really think Dems gotta understand their Pro-Genocide talking points continue to be Republican talking points that benefit Republicans and the Rich.

Sincerely ask yourself why you don't hold the same standards for BLM as you do Anti-Genocide/Pro-Palestine protests.

Please ask yourself if the difference is solely because you're scared to demand anything from Dems, lest we lose through Actual Political Action instead of simply voting silently and hoping for the best or ignoring problems we cause without our permission?

Be Ignorant of corruption or bad legislation or mistakes, They Have To Be Perfect. Anything less and they'll lose. Because of course, Kamala Has To Be Perfect whilst Dump does not.

And because of Your Mentality, you have Boxed Her Into This Situation where she cannot possibly give a definitive answer. If she is public about a Ceasefire Dems Will Not Vote For Her. If she says she's pro-Israel it's the exact same.

All You Have To Do Is Be Anti-Genocide So She Can Give A Definitive Answer. God damn.

Why should people be silent about an Active Genocide we're funding? Why should you be allowed to Demand Free Healthcare and accountability for police but are not allowed to for Israel's Genocide?

Ask yourself why you want a Tyranny and yet are scared of Dump?

Don't get intellectually lazy here-

You Are In Fact Demanding Tyranny by telling people Protesting or Demanding Better will Cause Us To Be Hurt.

Quit being Republican about Genocide/Israel. Do you just defend party blindly no matter the fucking cost? Grow up! Or admit you're republican but vote dem for social reasons.

Get out of this wide umbrella of a party if you don't support our ability to Demand from Elected Officials. That is what Republicans Vote For. Not Dems.

Fuck off you pathetic, terrified, nazi enabling larpers who can't come to the most elementary school conclusion upon Mass Murder and Simple Civics.

Demand Better.

Genocide Bad No Matter Who.

Fuck you.

[lozmastermm]

People are lying when they said they were voting for change when voting R btw.

They want things to stay the same, but they want them to snowball, get worse, they want all problems in the world to continue and to regress us so hard that no one is happy.

No one will be happy until they're allowed to, and if taking a life, or controlling one, makes them happy, then that is the Larp of reality we live.

It's over folks. Absolutely. Everything. was on the line here. It will only erode from here, and there's 0 chance we change anything in 2 years, there won't even be elections.

It's over. Don't lie to people, get prepared, this is the beginning of the erosion. So Much Was On The Line. And we normalized it. This is the new now, mass shootings, lynches and false warrants, pedophilia and rape is basically legal with no chance of any court going after you, the economy is completely fucked unrecoverably, no other party will be allowed to run let alone stands ANY fucking chance after such a historic defeat like UNDERSTAND it NOT be a landslide AGAINST Dump means The World Is Now Fucked.

like my god ya'll they have total control, you can see this panic in dem politicians faces that night, an actual "oh shit we have to move out of the country and fast" look, because they're near immediately going to send the military against us. They're going to kill So Many People it's not even funny. They're going to take complete control of the country and LONG before we turn on them, we will turn on each other.

Oh and do Pirate, pirate as much as you can, because shit's gonna get pricey, and people are going to get desperate, and the internet won't be uncensored or unfucked for very long under this administration. Archive archive archive everyone and everything.

It's so over. It's so bad. This is a nightmare, a nightmare Dems will never save us from, I fucking knew Biden was gonna fuck us, I fucking knew it. God damnit.

And nobody seems to really know...they really have no idea. Your average uninformed, your R voter, they have no idea, and they don't care, and they'll never know, nor will they accept or change, they will Never change for the better. An entire party of rapist murderers. Below human scum, subhuman filth, actual, trash that'll never form a unique thought of their own. A disturbed pile of flesh that moves and worsens the world where ever it can reach.

[eisthenameofme]

kind of hard to take a lot of the people claiming to be antifascist anarchists seriously when a solid chunk of them seem to think not wanting the state to exist means they are no longer in the reality where it currently exists.

[iamnotawomanimagod]

.

[xcziel]

it's a great day to be in the most insane headspace

where i'm sick and thus loopy and whiplashing violently between: shocks of anger and despair and then vibrating with delight

my blood pressure is so far up i'm gonna take an aspirin this is ridiculous

the fucking slow tigers are gaining on me i swear

[azuresquirrel]

the fact that we're a year out from a major election year in the United States and instead of encouraging people to vote for their local and state elections I'm already seeing Dems on socials lecturing about "not expecting perfection" and "lesser of two evils" during a time where there is widespread objection to Biden and crew literally funding and supporting Israel's genocide of Gaza is just

ah yes, damn youths and their inability to compromise on silly non-issues of *checks notes* actively supporting and financing genocide

[my-timing-is-digital]

[ Ooc: Elections in the Netherlands... I don't expect much from it. The conservative party will probably be the largest... again... Fecking rich people... Fortunately, not with the former PM at the helm, but still, sucks ass. ]

[endtimers]

jesus goddamn christ i Cannot Wait for my province to re-elect this fucking hag of a premier who wants to replicate The Kinds Of Freedom In Desantis' Florida :):):):)

[marmolita]

followup to my ranty post from a little bit back about how the people yelling about critical race theory at school board meetings are largely not actually representing how parents feel because I have data!

The Indiana Department of Education did a survey of parents and found (emphasis mine):

* The vast majority (88%) of Indiana parents are satisfied with the quality of their child’s school. Satisfaction is even higher among those whose child is enrolled in elementary school (90%) and those in rural and small-town areas throughout the state (96%). * Most parents know and approve of the subjects and topics taught at their child’s school. Only 7% of parents say they don’t approve of the subjects and topics taught to their child, and of those 7%, about two-thirds acknowledge that they do not know, or are unsure, what subjects and topics are being taught.

Only 1/3 of 7% of parents disapprove of what's being taught and actually know what's being taught, which is around 2% overall. And yet, that small percentage of people are noisy enough that the state legislature is considering all kinds of bullshit bills to restrict what teachers can teach.

Anyway, all of this to say that when you get the impression from social media of "those crazy parents in red states are all trying to make schools intolerant and racist," take a step back and actually look at what's going on. This is a problem of media coverage and political power plays, and schools are just the pawns. Parents -- both liberal and conservative -- overwhelmingly think that the subject material being taught in schools is fine as is.

What are parents actually concerned about? According to this survey, affordability of college, and safety in school are the top concerns. Only 27% of parents reported that post-high school education is affordable. 47% of lower-income parents in metropolitan areas are concerned about their children's safety at school. It's really unfortunate that what parents care about is not what's having changes pushed in the legislature.

[twpsyn-who]

AGSHSHS I FELL ASLEEP DURING POLAND'S PERFORMANCE AND JUST WOKE UP WHAT THE FUCK MAN 😭✋🏻

[smile-files]

idk why but i find it so funny when friends tell me that i'm optimistic (which happens relatively frequently). i think they're wrong most of the time but ok if you want to kin-assign me clover ii then i'll take it /silly

[montanabohemian]

i fucking hate maps like these because it never paints an accurate fucking picture:

MONTANA HAS SAME DAY VOTER REGISTRATION.

do you understand how hard we have fought to keep that? so like. fucking stop it. should you get registered beforehand and have a plan to vote? absolutely. but if you miss the "deadline" YOU CAN STILL REGISTER TO VOTE AT THE ELECTIONS OFFICE AND ON ELECTION DAY. like i'm sorry you live in a stupid ass state that doesn't have same day registration, but montana does. so fucking deal with it.

Oh look, it seems like there's a Republican-led movement to purge voter rolls in the lead-up to the election! It's almost as if your vote matters and they don't want you to vote! Anyway, I whipped up a quick map (based on this) that shows when the voter registration deadline is in each state. There are a few deadlines coming up in the next week or so.

If you live in a state that regularly purges voter rolls for infrequent voters (the orange ones in the first map), or if you moved recently, it's good to check if you're still registered to vote.

Vote.org makes it super easy to check your registration: https://www.vote.org/am-i-registered-to-vote/

Just put in your address and DOB and they'll tell you whether you're registered. (And they give you a quick link to register online if it turns out that you're not! Only the 9 states in white on my map don't have online registration, and for those they provide instructions on how to do it via mail or in person.)

So yeah, give yourself peace of mind -- do a quick check. :)

[hallows-personal-hell]

anyways so thank you to all the idiots able to vote who refused to over some fucking moral highground that have more than likely contributed to this. you've helped fuck shit up. good job.