#that has also had systemic voter suppression

[mstopportunity]

I also need everyone in "safe" states to realize that they need to get out and vote anyways. Lack of participation from one party is how safe states become swing states. Also, if your district is gerrymandered (which it likely is), it's STILL important that you vote. Because gerrymandering relies on having Just Enough voters of one party to outperform the other party consistently, while sequestering as many voters for the other party in as small a number of districts as possible. This means that with sufficient turnout you can flip a gerrymandered district, while the safe districts are pretty solidly safe.

Even if you're not in one of the "7 battleground states" you still need to get out and vote, because you never know if this might be the year that there's so much voter turnout Texas swings blue.

there are enough tumblr users who can vote in US battleground states to literally swing the election, do you realize that?? the election is going to come down to like 80’000 votes in those states — that could be your vote! so if you live in pennsylvania, georgia, arizona, nevada, north carolina, wisconsin, michigan, etccc your vote is going to make a huge, huge difference. please for the love of god vote (and if you live in a different state, you still need to vote too)

[iwritethingssometimes]

I'm seeing some posting about a feeling of fishiness about the recently completed US Election.

In the attempt to do something more productive than my last post, I'm gonna do an adhoc examination of how feasible I think a "rigged election" actually is, looking at a few methods that could have been used. So, to start with, what is the actual evidence here?

Most of it is... honestly vibes based, which I get, but don't put a lot of stock in, There was a lot of energy around the Harris campaign, and she had some good polls, but Donald Trump has proved nothing else in the past fucking decade, its that the polls literally do not matter for him, and he can outperform them by a hundred miles.

But. There's also some numbers.

None of this has been verified yet, and I want to make that clear, but this year has largely reported record turnout in a ton of states, especially the swing states, and yet, so far.

The number of votes seems much lower this year.

Not republican votes, not democrat votes, all votes. Hell, third party voting collapsed this year--whatever else you take from this election, this was not a case of the left splitting the vote.

Now, it's true that the vote count hasn't been completed, and it's possible that the numbers will make more sense once that's done. It's also true that the states didn't have quite the same turn-out as last year... but it was only a percentage point or two lower.

Add that to the frequent postings about people having their ballots rejected for... questionable reasons, and.

Well. It starts going from a "the moon is fake!" conspiracy to "Epstein had sex slaves" conspiracy.

But, okay, is it even possible for Trump to have faked the vote like this? People talked about it, but it was mostly in terms of legal challenges trying to overturn a Harris victory, or pulling in the supreme court to decide narrow districts. This, by all accounts, seems to be a straight forward Trump sweep.

So if there is shenanigans afoot, how could he have done it?

There's three feasible(ish) pathways, in my opinion:

Voter suppression and manipulation pre-ballot: Yeah this happened. It's also irrelevant to any possibility that the vote counts were tampered with. Look, this election was flooded with misinformation, legal suits, court cases, and election officials doing everything in their power to fuck with people's right to vote. It was filled with ballot boxes being lit on fire. Elon Musk did a fucking paid vote scheme! Of course there was voter suppression! But there always is, and although it was worse this year than many others, it wouldn't cause any numerical mismatch between turn out and votes, and there's not much that can be done now for this election. Even if someone voted because Musk slipped them $100, no court will ever be able to prove they didn't just happen upon $100 bucks and then voted for Trump.

Voting machines were manipulated: A few hours ago I would have said this was practically impossible, but apparently a bunch of election officials and cyber-security experts were sounding the alarm about this a few months ago, so, uh. That being said, I've seen people claiming that Starlink or whatever hacked voting machines, and no. No, Starlink did not hack voting machines. No one "hacked" voting machines. They weren't connected to the internet, or any wireless communication systems, because anyone with any degree of cybersecurity knowledge will tell you that's how you create an insecure system. Now, it's not impossible, technically speaking, than Elon Musk or fucking Russia managed to hire engineers and somehow bribe enough officals to get access to the machines and install hardware that would allow external access, but in that case we live in a Bond movie and somehow have bigger problems. So, if the voting machines themselves were compromised in any technological way, it would have required direct, physical access, which should be basically impossible, unless...

Ballot officials fucked with the vote This is the one I think is plausible. Basically, in this case, what could have happened is that various election officials at different levels of the process more or less lied about the vote count. This could have happened in a lot of different ways--they could have found reasons to reject mail-in ballots, which several states attempted to make legal, they could have found reasons to reject in-person ballots, which several states attempted to make legal. They could have, if the corruption ran deep enough to make this feasible, just... not counted or reported votes that swung for Harris. They could have, if the election machines work similar to the ones up here in BC, seen the results from the machines, then called the central election office over the phone--because remember, the ballot boxes should not be connected to anything. I don't know. There's a lot of options, and it varies from state to state, because remember, each state runs their own elections, and has their own rules and procedures.

So yeah, three explanations, only one of which is really plausible.

Now, I want to be clear, I don't think this election was fraudulent. Not yet, at least, I need to see actual evidence, or this is nothing more than a theory, but I also want to be clear.

...3 makes sense.

3 would explain why urban areas seemed to be underrepresented in this election, while rural areas surged. 3 would explain a discrepancy between voter turn out and votes counted. 3 would fit the strategy Trump and MAGA loyalists have been describing for the last four years, of infiltrating the election machinery and manipulating it to their own ends.

So I'm not saying it's likely that Trump fucked with the vote, not without evidence. Not yet.

But I will say this looks a hell of a lot more plausible than any claims made in the aftermath of the 2020 election.

[kookygobbledygook]

I want to talk quickly about the four reasons Australia could never have a president like Trump, and this isn't a dig at the US or it's citizens. And it's not holding up Australia as some sort of becon of government, because as you'll see there are so many flaws in our system. This is about government structure and voting policy. It is also so, so funny to think about.

1. Preferential voting: A.K.A raked voting. Unlike the U.S system which is most votes wins, this takes into account second and third choices of voters. It means that it takes into account not only who people like most but also who people like least. Essentially our system has a "I don't want A to win, I want B to lose," clause which is so petty and I love it.

2. Compulsory voting. Everyone has to vote, or you get fined. Now, I know that most of you think that would be crap, but think about this; no voter suppression, because everyone has to vote. No point in voter fraud because ballot numbers have to line up with the population. You don’t have to make sure your voter registration is up to date because you just do it once when you turn 18, and you stay in the system forever because you're always gonna need to be registered. And the government has to make sure voting is accessible to everyone because everyone has to vote. Plus you get a democracy sausage.

3. We don't vote for a prime minister. We vote for a party, and the leader of that party gets to be in charge. Now Americans probably are thinking "we do that too." Not quite. You see, if all the citizens are hating on a prime minister too much and their party is getting antsy about the polls, they can have a leadership spill and nominate a new head of their party, who will become prime minister without an election. Since 2007 we had Kevin Rudd who was ousted by Julia Gillard who was ousted by Kevin again who was voted out and replaced by Tony Abbott who was ousted by Malcom Turnbull who was ousted by Scott Morrison who was voted out and replaced by Anthony Albanese. That seven PMs over three elections, two of them the same guy. You think Trump wouldn't have been pushed out in his first six months?

4. Because we are still part if the commonwealth King Charles is still our head of state and has the power to fire a Prime minister. It's kind of happened before. I hate the fact that Charles is our head of state and I don't believe he should have the power to dismiss an official elected by the Australian people. But if Trump was our Prime Minister it would be sooooo funny to watch Charles fire him.

[blogthebooklover]

30 Things I Learned As An Adult

In honor of me turning 30 in January, I’ve decided to write out a list of 30 things I learned as an adult.  Now, some of these worked for me through trial and error, while others did not.

1. Self Care Is Important

I cannot stress this enough.  We all need to practice self care, to take time for ourselves.  It takes baby steps to find a good self-care routine, and there’s plenty of online resources to find one to your tastes.  Remember it is all about trial and error, and don’t worry about perfecting it right away.  Research some different self care routines online as a starting point.

2. Read Books, Not Fanfiction

Okay, don’t get me wrong, I do love reading some good ole fanfiction, and current events.  However, definitely pick up a book once in a while.  Whether it’s a graphic novel, comics, manga, please develop a reading habit.  It definitely helped me out a lot as a former college dropout, there are reading lists on sites like Goodreads, here on Tumblr, even colleges have lists what books students are required to read.  And it does help with expanding your knowledge and vocabulary.  As I’ve previously said, I’m a former college dropout who’s currently back in school, however, developing a healthy reading habit is what kept me grounded.  If you need a starting point, I recommend reading a fiction book, preferably in the SciFi/Fantasy genre; or reread a book from your childhood.  Also, PLEASE GET A LIBRARY CARD!  You’ll definitely be saving a lot of money, and we need to support our public libraries now more than ever.

3. Say “No” More Often

If you don’t feel comfortable going out, or if your manager calls and asks to cover a shift, just say “no.”  Remember, you have the power to set boundaries, especially with family, friends, and work.  This correlates to number 1 on my list, self care is super important, and you cannot put your health at risk for anyone.  I’m going to repeat that last part: SELF CARE IS SUPER IMPORTANT, AND YOU CANNOT PUT YOUR HEALTH AT RISK FOR ANYONE!

4. Register To Vote, And Vote In Every Election

With politics being so polarized and divisive in the past decade, and the upcoming 2024 US Presidential Election, please register to vote.  And voter suppression has been very rampant in the past two, arguably three, decades.  To anyone about to turn 18 here in the US, please register to vote ASAP!  And vote in every goddamn election, both national and local.  I seriously cannot stress this enough.

5. Eat Healthy, No Seriously

I love some fast food once in a while now, however, please take some time to learn about healthy eating.  It will catch up with you in the future, and our US healthcare system is already fucked as all hell.  I know the rising costs of everything, including food, is insane right now; but please keep informed about how to prepare good healthy food.

6. Take Breaks From Current Events, Social Media, and the Internet

This also correlates with number one.  While it is very important to stay informed with what is happening in the world/country of origin; especially with the US Presidential Election year.  Remember, it’s okay to take breaks from reading too much news, and scrolling through social media feeds.  It really does have an effect on your mental health, and unfortunately too many people tend to fall down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole on all sides of the political spectrum.  To the teenagers and young adults, take breaks and focus on your mental health and well-being.  To the adults, read the previous sentence.  With everything so polarizing, take care of yourself first.  

7. High School Friends DO NOT LAST!

My friends from high school and early college years were definitely the “ride and die” type of  friends, metaphorically speaking.  If you have that one friend who was/is the “give the shirt off their back” type, check in on them once in a while.  However, with the former, just move on.  The friends I had in high school definitely had a lot of childhood trauma, and in one aspect, I’m glad that they were honest about it; it was/is a way to heal.  However, any “friend” who just doesn’t want to better themselves and use you for any convenience, DUMP THEM AND CUT OFF ALL CONTACT!  Remember just as you set boundaries with your toxic family members, and even for your job, you should do the same with friends.

8. Change Jobs, ASAP!

This is a very important one.  I didn’t really have a job as a teenager, I wanted to enjoy being a kid for a little longer, however, I did have an occasional babysitting job.  At 23 years old, I got a job at a fast food place.  While I do appreciate part of the experience, like how to use the “customer service” voice, however, any red flags that pop up in your head, change jobs, ASAP!  It was toxic, too political (for some weird reason) and a lot of drama (and not from the teenagers).  The grocery store I work at now does have its busy times, however, it’s much more calmer, and I don’t see too many “Karen” types. 

9. Declutter More Often

This is also a definite must as you get older.  Whatever you don’t need anymore, donate them.  Whatever is completely broken, throw it away!  Whatever it is that is in good condition, sell it or maybe give it to someone as a birthday/holiday present.  Any old makeup, throw it away!  It’ll help reduce the amount of clutter and mess.  If you need a starting point, I suggest the KonMari method.  It really did help me out a lot.

10.  Use A Planner

This is a life-and-time saver.  Write down any appointments, cleaning days, paydays, bill charges, etc.; into a physical planner.  If you’re in college, please use one!  And write down any assignments to work on/turn in BEFORE the deadline.  Also, anything important, put into your calendar app on your phone and laptop as a reminder.

11.  Have A Skin Care Routine

Okay, I know having a skin care routine isn’t for everyone, and we all have different reactions to skin care products; however, don’t be afraid to experiment with a good skin care routine.  In my early teen years, I used Proactiv skin care for my acne, and it helped out a lot.  Remember: cleanse, tone, any serum of your choice, and moisturize.  This also helps out if you don’t feel like jumping into the shower.  Also, use sunscreen, seriously.

12.  Don’t Get Married, Until You’re Ready

This is coming from someone who is single, lol.  If you plan on getting married to your romantic partner, I’m proud of you! Marriage is about communication, being honest, and doing equal amount of work (finances, household chores, etc.)  Save money if you’re planning for a wedding, or go to your local courthouse to get a marriage license if you don’t want the big, fancy reception.  

13.  Don’t Have Kids, Until You’re Ready

Again, this is coming from someone who is single and childless, lol.  Having kids is a lot of work: physically, mentally, emotionally, and financially.  Not everyone is capable of being a parent, and I have read PLENTY of posts on here and other websites about toxic parents/parenting styles.  Take time and think about if you’re ready to become a parent.

14.  Learn How To Budget Your Money

This is for anyone of any age out there.  Please learn how to budget your spending.  Look for stuff on sale or clearance, or cut back on certain types of spending. I know most people have no idea where to start, but there is! There’s some great websites and YouTube channels on how to budget your money. Another great tool to use are spreadsheets like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. I use a Google Sheet template to help track my spending and budget my finances. Also, if you have gift cards from your birthday/holidays/etc; definitely use them, you won't be breaking your bank account :). Also, definitely have some paper cash in your wallet for emergency use.     

15.  Open A Savings/Emergency Funds Account, ASAP!

This is a huge one to have as an adult, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Anything left over from paying the bills, from a side hustle, or from your tax returns, put that into savings.  Certain banks will also have the option of creating “financial goals” in savings accounts; so I highly recommend using that as well.  This also correlates with number 14.  If you’re interested, open two or three savings accounts, the last one should only be for emergency funds.

16.  Get A Physical Hobby, AKA Exercise!

It doesn’t matter what type of exercise you do, please do it!  And for anyone who is physically disabled, there are modified options provided on YouTube.  We do lose certain motor functions as we age, so definitely pick an exercise that’s right for you, as they say. Even if it's just going outside for a walk for 30 minutes, please do some type of exercise.   

17.  Learn How To Meal Prep

It doesn’t have to be for every meal of every day, pick a meal you want to make and prepare ahead of time.  And prepare that meal the day before, so it will be on hand when you leave your house. There are some great videos on YouTube, and some ideas from Pinterest if you need a starting point.

18.  If You’re Able To, Go To The Dentist!

Seriously though, try and go for a checkup/teeth cleaning.  You’re only given one set of teeth after all your baby teeth fall out, and you need to take good care of them.  If you’re able to, or live near to one, local colleges have free cleanings through their dental training programs.   

19.  If Your Job Offers a 401K, GET ON IT NOW!

My old job at a fast food restaurant didn’t have retirement benefits, but my current grocery store job does.  I jumped on it right away, even if it’s not the job I want right now.  And it’s a good starting point to have some money saved up for retirement. If you leave the job that has a 401k, you can do what's called a rollover. This will put the money that was set into the first retirement fund into another one; you can do this with your bank or if your new job has a 401k.

20.  If You Don’t Have Health Insurance, Sign Up With The State, or Through Your Job.

In my experience, I have insurance through the state at the moment.  If your job offers health insurance as well, jump on it right away, even if it’s not the job you want, it’ll be a starting point that correlates with number 19.

21.  It’s Okay To Not Go To College

This is coming from someone who was a college dropout at 19, and currently back in school.  If you don’t feel ready to go to college, that’s okay too.  College is very expensive, especially here in the US, and not everyone can get a scholarship, even if they did apply for a lot of them.  Maybe get a part-time job or two (for some income), explore some hobbies you enjoy, and take some time to think about some goals.     

22. If You’re In College, It’s Okay To Stay At Home

Again, coming from a former college dropout, I stayed at home while attending a nearby community college in another state.  However, out-of-state tuition and housing is also very expensive.  If you have a good relationship with your parents, and if you’re going to school in-state, talk to them about staying home while going to school.  If you don’t, then talk to a trusted friend or family member about getting an apartment together that isn’t on-site housing while you’re attending school.

23. Watch Non-English Language Movies

If you’re a movie lover like me, take some time to watch some foreign language films once in a while; and I know we anime fans do, lol.  To be honest, it does get very boring watching English language films all the time, whether from the States, England, or Canada.  Watching foreign language movies will definitely help you to understand the world a lot better, if you don’t have the means for traveling yet; and they will help you to understand that no matter where we live, we all have similar issues, hopes, dreams, etc.  If you need a starting point, I recommend any of the Studio Ghibli movies, I would start with Kiki’s Delivery Service; or Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth.  

24. SET BOUNDARIES

Remember: toxic family members and friends are not worth it.  You are worthy and valid for love and respect.  This correlates to number 7.  This is also very useful in the workplace.  

25. Express Yourself Through Fashion

Like everyone else, I feel most comfortable in jeans and a t-shirt myself; however sometimes I like to dress up just for fun, or to build up my self esteem and image.  This also helps when learning to pair an accessory with an outfit.  Play around with different color palettes and clothing styles, and find the one you feel the most “you.”  For example, I’ve always looked my best in jewel tones and a cooler color palette.  Read some fashion articles or watch some YouTube videos about how to pick out an outfit.

26. It Is Not Selfish To Prioritize Yourself

This correlates with number 3.  I have noticed it’s mostly a Western/American/Christian culture norm, we’re always told to take care of others before taking care of ourselves; or we’re selfish for prioritizing ourselves over others. It is not selfish, it is part of self care. Again, this is tied in with number 24.

27.   Failing and Making Mistakes Is Part of Growing

There is so much societal pressure on trying to be successful in life and work, especially in the Western/American hemisphere. However, making mistakes and failing at something is part of growing, and learning as an individual.

28. It's Okay to Not Have a Label to Define Yourself

Hear me out. I understand the use of labels in society and culture in general; everyone wants to belong somewhere and feel accepted. However, it is okay to not have a label to define who you are, and who you want/choose to be. Take all the time you need to figure out what's best for you. And sometimes people don't realize a label will fit them until they are much older in life. Or they couldn't at the time.

29. Don't Compare, You'll Get There

We are human, and we all have the tendency to compare ourselves to others. Unfortunately, this doesn't end after high school and college. And that needs to seriously change, especially in the Western/American hemisphere. Simply writing down "don't compare, you'll get there" is a great reminder to have for yourself. Everyone learns and grows at their own pace.

30. It Really Is The Little Things That Keep Us Going

When life seems to get too hard, it really is the little things that keep us going. Whether it is something as simple as someone holding a door open for you, or someone complimenting* you on your outfit or your work ethic; those moments are the ones that matter the most. Remember those moments, hold on to them.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Matt Johnson at The UnPopulist:

Joe Rogan, a UFC commentator and comedian who hosts the most popular podcast in the United States and possibly the world, has developed a reputation as an anti-tribal and fiercely independent voice who is beholden to no political party or faction. In the eyes of his regular guest Jordan Peterson, Rogan is “the most powerful journalist who’s ever lived,” and he has managed to gain such broad appeal because he “just asks questions.” But the notion that Rogan is an honest broker of information who has an overriding commitment to the truth is absurd. In fact, he has only one consistent mission: attempting to debunk mainstream media narratives by entertaining conspiracy theories. He’s more of a populist than a non-partisan—and he’s definitely no truth-seeker. Nothing illustrates this better than his warmly favorable treatment of both Donald Trump and RJK Jr., along with the parade of other cranks he features who peddle outlandish conspiracy theories and constantly congratulate themselves for being “anti-establishment” or “heterodox.” The effect, whether he intends it or not, is to overwhelm our epistemic infrastructure and pave the way for dangerous populist demagogues.

The Most Popular MAGA Pundit in the World

In his much-discussed interview with Trump last week, Rogan’s approach was to first encourage Trump to air his typical barrage of conspiratorial falsehoods—and then to endorse them himself. Take, for example, the segments on elections and voting, which were always shaped by Rogan’s MAGA-friendly framing. When Rogan told Trump that “a lot of weirdness ... was going on during the 2020 elections,” he was basically affirming Trump’s Big Lie and ignoring the fact that the 2020 election was the most scrutinized contest in American history. The rest predictably followed:

Trump claimed that “old-fashioned ballot screwing” had taken place, such as “people ... dropping in phony votes.” Rogan agreed.

Trump claimed “the Russia hoax” swayed the 2020 election. Rogan agreed.

Trump claimed the temporary suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story also swayed the election. Rogan agreed.

Trump claimed Democrats weaponized the justice system against him. Rogan agreed.

Trump alleged that Democrats are opposed to certain forms of voter ID “because they want to cheat.” Rogan responded: “It doesn’t make sense any other way.” Voter ID laws are a solution in search of a problem, given that there is little evidence of widespread voter fraud, but Rogan preferred to attribute to Democrats the most sinister motivation imaginable. Rogan also said “mail-in ballots are a problem” and worried about vote-counting machines getting hacked—a version of a famously discredited conspiracy theory for which Fox News had to pay $787 million in a settlement with a voting systems firm for pushing it on its airwaves.

When the discussion turned to the topic of denying election results, it was the perfect opportunity for Rogan, the interviewer renowned by fans as a tenacious truth-seeker, to press the most high-profile election denialist American politics has ever seen. That’s not what happened. Instead of challenging Trump’s years-long insistence that he actually won the 2020 election, or his enlisting of attorneys like Sidney Powell to claim communist-designed voting machines rigged the contest against him, or his attempts to overthrow the election by sending fake slates of electors to Washington, or his incitement of an insurrectionary mob at the U.S. Capitol to halt the certification of the vote, Rogan brought up ... the Russia investigation. Democrats are especially prone to denying election results, he told the man who believes he beat Hillary Clinton in the popular vote in 2016 and Joe Biden in the Electoral College vote in 2020.

But the segment on elections and voting wasn’t only about 2020. Consider their exchange about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio. After Trump declared that Democrats had turned Springfield into a “horror show” by “dropping” immigrants into the community, Rogan’s follow-up wasn’t to press Trump for corroboration, given that state Republican officials said this was nonsense and have asked Trump to stop endangering an innocent minority group. Instead, Rogan asked Trump to hypothesize about what must be motivating Democrats to allow a flood of immigrants into the country. As if that was not a loaded enough question, Rogan then proceeded to say this: “One of the things that’s been very clear is that they’ve moved a large percentage of these migrants—they’re coming across the border illegally—[into] swing states.” Never mind that the Haitians in Springfield are legal. In one fell swoop, Rogan managed to seamlessly transition from asking a question about immigration to asserting the Great Replacement conspiracy theory that Democrats are importing illegal voters to steal elections—exactly Trump’s view.

[...] Rogan’s embrace of RFK Jr. isn’t ultimately down to his personal charms—Rogan is dependably supportive of health and wellness conspiracism just generally. During the Covid pandemic, the Joe Rogan Experience was among the most formidable engines of misinformation about the disease, alternative treatments, and vaccine safety, with appearances by conspiracists like Bret Weinstein, Robert Malone, and Pierre Kory. He regularly invites conspiracists onto his show to pump out hours of uninterrupted anti-vaccine propaganda. Alex Jones—one of the most prolific and notorious conspiracy theorists of our time, who accused the grieving families of Sandy Hook victims of being crisis actors who were part of a plot to take Americans’ guns—has been a guest many times. Conspiracy theorists like Weinstein who rant about the horrors of vaccine injuries, the life-saving properties of ivermectin, and the totalitarian machinations of the WHO for long stretches, are honored guests.

[...]

Heterodox Media Has a Right-Wing Conspiracism Problem

Rogan has presented his podcast as a counterweight to the “establishment” media. That means he regularly platforms figures that traditional outlets won’t because they don’t meet basic journalistic standards. He evades accountability by always pointing out that he’s a mere comedian and entertainer, a clever rhetorical shield. This grants him the latitude to speculate as recklessly as he wants, indulge some of the wildest conspiracy theories around, and consistently get basic facts wrong while allowing his guests to do the same. So long as his audience laps it up, he has no reason to approach things any differently. But that’s also why the backlash from Trump’s MAGA base was so threatening to him: that’s an occasion in which he risked losing his audience. Rogan has become wholly captured by his audience even as he maintains the pretense that he’s a fair-minded and inquisitive political observer who is capable of seeing through what he regards as the sinister machinations and distortions of both major political parties. That’s why, when the wave of MAGA resentment came crashing down on him when he endorsed RFK Jr., he caved.

Kamala Harris’ supporters never expected Rogan’s endorsement, and there’s no Democratic equivalent of Catturd to chastise Rogan for supporting a third-party candidate. Nor does Rogan have much of a non-right audience. So all his incentives lean in the direction of becoming a right-wing conspiracy theorist—especially since, right now, there are more conspiracies on the right. Indeed, there are few, if any, MAGA conspiracy theories that Rogan hasn’t amplified. Last year, he suggested that Jan. 6 was a “false flag” operation in which “intelligence agencies were involved in provoking people into the Capitol.” He defended Arizona’s Republican senatorial candidate, Kari Lake’s, debunked claims about voter fraud in her state’s gubernatorial race: “All that Kari Lake stuff in Arizona they tried to dismiss, it doesn’t look like that’s invalid. It looks like there’s real fraud there.”

Rogan, of course, isn’t the only one. There is an entire industry of self-styled “heterodox” thinkers who have gravitated toward the right. Peterson, Rogan’s frequent guest, was once merely critical of campus identity politics and other forms of “wokeness.” He’s now a committed political partisan indistinguishable from a standard-fare Fox News commentator (e.g., characterizing Harris as “a master of chaos and deception” who is full of “envy” and “spite”; or describing Trump’s indictments as a “horrible” form of political “persecution”). Rogan and Peterson are part of an alternative media community providing an intellectual permission structure for people to support MAGA under the guise of “independent thought,” “heterodoxy,” or “classical liberalism.”

But Rogan plays a crucial role in this right-wing alternative media ecosystem. Because he has always presented himself as non-partisan, millions of listeners trust that he doesn’t have an agenda. Heterodox intellectuals and influencers like Peterson constantly decry traditional media as captured by elite interests, and they present shows like the Joe Rogan Experience as the alternative. But when Rogan and his guests shower praise on Trump and relentlessly attack his political opponents, they prove that they aren’t the anti-establishment crusaders they claim to be—they’re just supporting one establishment over another. In many ways, Rogan is the perfect embodiment of the Trump-era podcaster.

Joe Rogan claims to be an independent voice, but is in reality a right-wing conspiracy theorist whose podcast has a largely MAGA audience.

[tobiasdrake]

Keep an eye on the Filibuster as we move into the 2025 Congressional session.

Republicans like the Filibuster because the Filibuster keeps the Senate in a state of legislative deadlock. Under the rules of the Filibuster, it is extraordinarily difficult to pass legislation. With the exception of rare opportunities to circumvent, such as Budget Reconciliation, the Filibuster ensures that all bills require a 60+ Senate Majority to pass.

50+ is easy for a Majority Party to hit. 60+ is a death sentence. Democrats have the Senate? Doesn't matter. 60+. Republicans have the Senate? Doesn't matter. 60+. It also doesn't matter what the House does because even if they pass legislation, it goes to the Senate where it dies under the 60+ requirement.

The Filibuster has one job, and that is to break the Legislative Branch's kneecaps so no new laws can ever be passed. This is a big part of why government feels so inconsequential for many people: Because, legally, it is. No matter who's in power, they are all forbidden from legislating and spend their time just posturing for the base.

"I've written a bill to combat climate change that will inevitably die under 60+."

"Yeah, well I've written a bill to suppress trans people that will inevitably die under 60+."

This is just performance art being done in lieu of any ability to actually do their job. It's been that way for decades.

For Democratic administrations, the Filibuster is a controversial subject. Everybody recognizes that the wheel of power rotates from Right to Left and back again. Democratic politicians are terrified of losing that bulwark and opening the country up to the possibility of vast, sweeping change.

Democratic voters, on the other hand, are suffering under the current status quo and need vast, sweeping change. So there's a lot of pressure to nuke the filibuster.

Republicans feel similarly about the filibuster. However, there's a different mindset between the Left and the Right. The Left reveres the mechanisms of power. The institutional norms and standards. They want to do things the way things have always been done.

The Right plays to win. They revere the Filibuster only because they know that Leftist policies are harder to dismantle once they've gotten off the ground. It's hard to take away Social Security and Medicare, even though they desperately want to. It's hard to take away the Affordable Care Act, even though they desperately want to.

The Left wants to give people access to education and healthcare, and the Right wants to take it away. As things stand, the Right can campaign on bravado and empty promises. If the Filibuster was removed, they'd have to campaign on results. And generally speaking, people are usually happier with the results of Leftist leadership than Right-wing leadership.

So the Left clings to the Filibuster for fear of change. The Right clings to the Filibuster because their system of paper tiger chest-thumping is contingent on never having to put their money where their mouth is and let their voters find out what living in a Republican country would actually feel like.

This means that, under the Right, the Filibuster serves as a canary in a coal mine.

Mitch McConnell weakened the Filibuster by removing it for court appointments during the Trump administration. After using it to hold the courts open during the Obama administration, they were able to sweep a record number of judge appointments including three SCOTUS appointments that way.

The long-term effects mean Biden got a fuckton of court appointments too, but the damage was done. Mitch had something worth trading the Filibuster for, and the devastation he's wrought to our country by doing so will be felt for decades to come.

Keep an eye on the legislative filibuster. The Majority Party can revoke the Filibuster, but it's a genie in a bottle. Once it's revoked, it's unlikely that either party would ever put it back.

The Right clings to it because maintaining the status quo and keeping the government crippled is politically better for them than passing any sort of legislation. And they play to win; Not out of any loyalty to the decorum of the system.

If they revoke it, it can only mean that the Right feels that they have more to gain from rapid legislative action today than they could possibly lose from the threat of Left-wing legislating tomorrow. And that would guarantee dire things for all of us.

[mariacallous]

As the United States nears its consequential November election, concerns about the impacts of artificial intelligence on the country’s electoral integrity are front and center. Voters are receiving deceptive phone calls mimicking candidates’ voices, and campaigns are using AI images in their ads. Many fear that highly targeted messaging could lead to suppressed voter turnout or false information about polling stations. These are legitimate concerns that public officials are working overtime to confront.

But free and fair elections, the building blocks of democratic representation, are only one dimension of democracy. Today, policymakers must also recognize an equally fundamental threat that advanced technologies pose to a free and open society: the suppression of civil rights and individual opportunity at the hands of opaque and unaccountable AI systems. Ungoverned, AI undermines democratic practice, norms, and the rule of law—fundamental commitments that underpin a robust liberal democracy—and opens pathways toward a new type of illiberalism. To reverse this drift, we must reverse the currents powering it.

Liberal societies are characterized by openness, transparency, and individual agency. But the design and deployment of powerful AI systems are the precise inverse.

In the United States, as in any country, those who control the airwaves, steer financial institutions, and command the military have long had a wide berth to make decisions that shape society. In the new century, another set of actors joins that list: the increasingly concentrated group of corporate players who control data, algorithms, and the processing infrastructure to make and use highly capable AI systems. But without the kind of robust oversight the government prescribes over other parts of the economy and the military, the systems these players produce lack transparency and public accountability.

The U.S. foreign-policy establishment has long voiced legitimate concerns about the use of technology by authoritarian regimes, such as China’s widespread surveillance, tracking, and control of its population through deep collusion between the state and corporations. Civil society, academics, and journalists have recognized the threat of those same tools being deployed to similar ends in the United States. At the same time, many of today’s AI systems are undermining the liberal character of American society: They run over civil rights and liberties and cause harm for which people cannot easily seek redress. They violate privacy, spread falsehoods, and obscure economic crimes such as price-fixing, fraud, and deception. And they are increasingly used—without an architecture of accountability—in institutions central to American life: the workplace, policing, the legal system, public services, schools, and hospitals.

All of this makes for a less democratic American society. In cities across the United States, people of color have been arrested and jailed after being misidentified by facial recognition tools. We’ve seen AI used in loan refinancing charge more to applicants who went to historically Black colleges. An AI program aimed at preventing suicide among veterans prioritizes white men and overlooks survivors of sexual violence, who are much more likely to be women. Hidden behind computer code, illegal and unfair treatment long banned under federal law is becoming harder to detect and to contest.

To global observers, the trendlines of AI in American society will look familiar; the worst harms of these systems mirror the tenets of what has been called “illiberal democracy.” Under that vision—championed most famously by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a darling of the U.S. right—a society “maintains the outward appearances of a democracy … but in fact seeks to undermine all the institutions and norms that give democracy meaning,” scholar Susan Rubin Suleiman wrote in 2021. This doesn’t have to look like canceling elections or dismantling a sitting legislative body; instead, the vision takes the form of a more subtle assault—foreclosing the ability of individuals and minority groups to assert their rights.

As powerful new AI products are born and come of age amid a growing political alliance between far-right ideologues and some of the most powerful leaders in the technology industry, these foundational threats to free society could accelerate. Elon Musk, amplifying alarmist narratives on migrants and dehumanizing language about women and LGBT people, has said he would serve in a potential second Trump administration. Elsewhere in Silicon Valley, a growing cadre of venture capitalists are boldly betting the house on Trump in the belief that their portfolios—brimming with crypto and AI bets—may be better off under a president who is unfazed by harms to the most vulnerable and who challenges the exercise of fundamental rights.

Simply studying these tools and their effects on society can prove difficult: Scientific research into these systems is dominated by profit-motivated private actors, the only people who have access to the largest and most powerful models. The systems in question are primarily closed-source and proprietary, meaning that external researcher access—a basic starting point for transparency—is blocked. Employees at AI companies have been forced to sign sweeping nondisclosure agreements, including those about product safety, or risk losing equity. All the while, executives suggest that understanding precisely how these systems make decisions, including in ways that affect people’s lives, is something of luxury, a dilemma to be addressed sometime in the future.

The real problem, of course, is that AI is being deployed now, without public accountability. No citizenry has elected these companies or their leaders. Yet executives helming today’s big AI firms have sought to assure the public that we should trust them. In February, at least 20 firms signed a pledge to flag AI-generated videos and take down content meant to mislead voters. Soon after, OpenAI and its largest investor, Microsoft, launched a $2 million Societal Resilience Fund focused on educating voters about AI. The companies point to this work as core to their missions, which imagine a world where AI “benefits all of humanity” or “helps people and society flourish.”

Tech companies have repeatedly promised to govern themselves for the public good—efforts that may begin with good intentions but fall apart under the pressure of a business case. Congress has had no shortage of opportunities over the last 15 years to step in to govern data-centric technologies in the public’s interest. But each time Washington has cracked open the door to meaningful technology governance, it has quickly slammed it shut. Federal policymakers have explored reactive and well-meaning but flawed efforts to assert governance in specific domains—for example, during moments of attention to teen mental health or election interference. But these efforts have faded as public attention moved elsewhere. Exposed in this story of false starts and political theatrics is the federal government’s default posture on technology: to react to crises but fail to address the root causes.

Even following well-reported revelations, such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal, no legislation has emerged to rein in the technology sector’s failure to build products that prioritize Americans’ security, safety, and rights—not to mention the integrity of U.S. democracy. The same story has unfolded in the doomed push to achieve data privacy laws, efforts that have stalled out in committee ad infinitum, leaving Americans without the basic protections for their personal information that are enjoyed by people living in 137 other countries.

The Biden-Harris administration decided to push harder, through initiatives we worked both directly and indirectly on. Even before ChatGPT vaulted AI to the center of the national discourse in November 2022, President Joe Biden’s White House released an AI Bill of Rights proposing five key assurances all Americans should be able to hold in an AI-powered world: that AI technologies are safe, fair, and protective of their privacy; that they are made aware when systems are being used to make decisions about them; and that they can opt out. The framework was a proactive, democratic vision for the use of advanced technology in American society.

The vision has proved durable. When generative AI hit the consumer market, driving both anxiety and excitement, Biden didn’t start from scratch but from a set of clear and affirmative first principles. Pulling from the 2022 document, his 2023 executive order on AI mandated a coordinated federal response to AI, using a “rights and safety” framework. New rules from the powerful Office of Management and Budget turned those principles into binding policy, requiring federal agencies to test AI systems for their impact on Americans’ rights and safety before they could be used. At the same time, federal enforcement agencies used their existing powers to enforce protections and combat violations in the digital environment. The Federal Trade Commission stepped up its enforcement of digital-era violations of well-established antitrust laws, putting AI companies on notice for potentially unfair and deceptive practices that harm consumers. Vice President Kamala Harris presided over the launch of a new AI Safety Institute, calling for a body that addressed a “full spectrum” of risks, including both longer-term speculative risks and current documented harms.

This was a consequential paradigm shift from America’s steady state of passive technology nongovernance—proof-positive that a more proactive approach was possible. Yet these steps face a range of structural limitations. One is capacity: Agencies across the federal government carrying out the work of AI governance will need staff with sociotechnical expertise to weigh the complex trade-offs of AI’s harms and opportunities.

Another challenge is the limited reach of executive action. Donald Trump has promised to repeal the AI executive order and gut the civil service tasked with its implementation. If his first term is any indication, a Republican administration would reinstate the deregulatory status quo. Such is the spirit of plans reportedly drawn up by Larry Kudlow, Trump’s former National Economic Council director, to create “industry-led” task forces, placing responsibility for assessing AI tools’ safety into the hands of the powerful industry players who design and sell them.

And Biden’s measures, for the most part, guide only the government’s own use of AI systems. This is a valuable and necessary step, as the behavior of agencies bears on the daily lives of Americans, particularly the most vulnerable. But the effects of executive actions on the private sector are circumscribed, related to pockets of executive authority such as government contracting, civil rights enforcement, or antitrust action. A president’s pen alone cannot create a robust or dynamic accountability infrastructure for the technology industry. Nor can we rely on agencies to hold the line; recent Supreme Court decisions—Loper Bright, Corner Post, and others—have weakened their authority to use their mandated powers to adapt to new developments.

This, of course, is the more fundamental shortcoming of Biden’s progress on AI and technology governance: It does not carry the force of legislation. Without an accompanying push in Congress to counter such proposed rollbacks with new law, the United States will continue to embrace a largely ungoverned, innovation-at-all-costs technology landscape, with disparate state laws as the primary bulwark—and will continue to see the drift of emerging technologies away from the norms of robust democratic practice.

Yet meaningful governance efforts may be dead on arrival in a Congress that continues to embrace the flawed argument that without carte blanche for companies to “move fast and break things,” the United States would be doomed to lose to China, on both economic and military fronts. Such an approach cedes the AI competition to China’s terms, playing on the field of Chinese human rights violations and widespread surveillance instead of the field of American values and democratic practice. It also surrenders the U.S. security edge, enabling systems that could break or fail at any moment because they were rushed to market in the name of great-power competition.

Pursuing meaningful AI governance is a choice. So is the decision, over decades, to leave powerful data-centric technologies ungoverned—a decision to allow an assault on the rights, freedoms, and opportunities of many in American society. There is another path.

Washington has the opportunity to build a new, enduring paradigm in which the governance of data-centric predictive technologies, as well as the industry that creates them, is a core component of a robust U.S. democracy.

We must waste no time reaffirming that the protections afforded by previous generations of laws also apply to emerging technology. For the executive branch, this will require a landmark effort to ensure protections are robustly enforced in the digital sphere, expanding enforcement capacity in federal agencies with civil rights offices and enforcement mandates and keeping up the antitrust drumbeat that has put anti-competitive actors on notice.

The most consequential responsibility for AI governance, though, rests with Congress. Across the country, states are moving to pass laws on AI, many of which will contradict one another and form an overlapping legal tangle. Federal lawmakers should act in the tradition of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, issuing blanket protections for all Americans. At a minimum, this should include a new liability regime and guarantee protection from algorithmic discrimination; mandate pre- and post-deployment testing, transparency, and explainability of AI systems; and a requirement for developers of AI systems to uphold a duty of care, with the responsibility to ensure that systems are safe and effective.

These AI systems are powered by data, so such a bill should be accompanied by comprehensive data privacy protections, including a robust embrace of data minimization, barring companies from using personal information collected for one purpose in order to achieve an unrelated end.

While only a start, these steps to protect democratic practice in the age of AI would herald the end of America’s permissive approach to the technology sector’s harms and mark the beginning of a new democratic paradigm. They should be followed forcefully by a separate but complementary project: ensuring that individuals and communities participate in deciding how AI is used in their lives—and how it is not. Most critically, more workers—once called America’s “arsenal of democracy”—must organize and wield their collective power to bargain over whether, when, and how technologies are used in the workplace.

Such protections must also extend beyond the workplace into other areas of daily life where technology is used to shape important decisions. At a moment of weakening democratic norms, we need a new, concerted campaign to ease the path for anyone to challenge unfair decisions made about them by ungoverned AI systems or opt out of AI systems’ use altogether. This must include a private right of action for ordinary people who can show that AI has been used to break the law or violate their rights. We must also open additional pathways to individual and collective contestation, including robust, well-resourced networks of legal aid centers trained in representing low-income clients experiencing algorithmic harms.

We can bring many more people into the process of deciding what kinds of problems powerful AI systems are used to solve, from the way we allocate capital to the way we conduct AI research and development. Closing this gap requires allowing people across society to use AI for issues that matter to them and their communities. The federal government’s program to scale up access to public research, computing power, and data infrastructure is still only a pilot, and Congress has proposed to fund it at only $2.6 billion in its first six years. To grasp that number’s insufficiency, one needed only to listen to Google’s spring earnings call, where investors heard that the tech giant planned to spend about $12 billion on AI development per quarter. Next, the U.S. government should invest in the human and tech infrastructures of “public AI,” to provide both a sandbox for applied innovation in the public interest and a countervailing force to the concentration of economic and agenda-setting power in the AI industry.

These are some of the measures the United States can undertake to govern these new technologies. Even in an administration that broadly supports these goals, however, none of this will be possible or politically viable without a change in the overall balance of power. A broad-based, well-funded, and well-organized political movement on technology policy issues is needed to dramatically expand the coalition of people interested and invested in technology governance in the United States.

Ushering in these reforms begins with telling different stories to help people recognize their stake in these issues and understand that AI tools directly impact their access to quality housing, education, health care, and economic opportunity. This awareness must ultimately translate to pressure on lawmakers, a tool those standing in the way of a democratic vision for AI use to great effect. Musk is reportedly bankrolling a pro-Trump super PAC to the tune of tens of millions per month. Andreessen Horowitz, the venture firm led by anti-regulation founders, increased its lobbying budget between the first and second quarter of this year by 135 percent. Not only are the big corporate tech players spending millions of dollars on lobbying per quarter, but each is also running a political operation, spending big money to elect political candidates who will look after their interests.

The academic, research, and civil society actors whose work has helped change the tech policy landscape have succeeded in building strong policy and research strategies. Now is the time to venture further into the political battlefield and prepare the next generation of researchers, policy experts, and advocates to take up the baton. This will require new tools, such as base-building efforts with groups across the country that can help tie technology governance to popular public issues, and generational investments in political action committees and lobbying. This shift in strategy will require new, significant money; philanthropic funders who have traditionally backed research and nonprofit advocacy will need to also embrace an explicitly political toolkit.

The public interest technology movement urgently needs a political architecture that can at last impose a political cost on lawmakers who allow the illiberal shift of technology companies to proceed unabated. In the age of AI, the viability of efforts to protect democratic representation, practice, and norms may well hinge on the force with which non-industry players choose to fund and build political power—and leverage it.

A choice confronts the United States as we face down AI’s threats to democratic practice, representation, and norms. We can default to passivity, or we can use these instruments to shape a free society for the modern era. The decision is ours to make.

[qqueenofhades]

I wanted to share my absentee/early voter experience in case anyone else needs to vote absentee but is afraid it will be too confusing. I'm a mil spouse and we're not living at our home of record, which meant looking up how to vote absentee. The step by step process was detailed on the website and pretty easy to follow. Well, I got a phone call today from a nice lady who received my ballot and was reviewing it. She said my driver's license number wasn't in the system, but my SSN I also had on my

Signature sheet was. If I was okay with it, she would email me the signature sheet, I would complete just it again with only my SSN, scan it, and email it back to her, and I would be good to go. I thanked her for reaching out to me instead of just going, "wrong format" and tossing it. So if anyone here is intimidated by voting absentee, it's not as hard as it seems and there are good people out there who truly value every vote. This was TX, btw.

Thanks for sharing! I'm sure we're all glad to hear a positive voting story come out of Texas, instead of you know, TEXAS (derogatory). I live in a state with full mail voting, so my ballot is sent to me directly a few weeks before the election, I fill it out, and then can drop it off at a box nearby at my convenience. I am also signed up for the e-notification system that tells you that your ballot has been sent, received, and counted, so you can double-check that it made it there and was tabulated. While obviously there are a lot of states that purposefully enact voter suppression laws and try to make it hard to vote, there are also (as noted here) people who are eager to help you and make sure that process goes as planned. So yes. VOTE.

[princecharmingtobe]

Some insights I've gained working as a poll worker for early voting

I strongly wonder how much "voter suppression" is actually just sheer incompetence on the part of various systems/organizations. Because as a poll worker, I now want to fight both the BMV (my state's version of the DMV) and the postal service. And to a lesser extent the local election office.

Common issues we deal with that are not the result of malice, but of incompetence:

Person is still registered at an address they haven't lived at in years, despite being told when they update their license that it will also update their registration (can still vote)

Staff struggles to find person's registration in the system, find out it's because whoever entered them into the system in the first place put them in wrong (incorrect birthday, misspelled name, etc.). (can still vote)

Person was told they could register when they got their license at the BMV. The BMV evidently did not follow through (cannot vote, this one has caused us some drama)

Moved here from elsewhere, was told when they updated their license their registration would also be updated. See above. (can vote, but only if they can get back to the place they're registered in, which has varying degrees of difficulty)

Person requested an absentee ballot, did not receive it before the date they would need to be leaving the city by, so they came to vote in person instead. (can vote, we just gotta call the election office to have them cancel the absentee ballot). We had an especially odd case of a couple filling out their request forms and mailing them together. Wife received her ballot, husband doesn't even show up as having requested one.

Person received absentee ballot, filled it out, mailed it back with plenty of time... and for some reason it doesn't make it to the election office until months later. I personally have not experienced this as I'm only a volunteer poll worker, but my mom who worked more in the system saw it a few times.

None of these are malicious acts intended to rig the election one way or another, I've seen them happen to people of all different genders, races, backgrounds, ages, and political leanings. It's just sheer incompetence by certain groups. And I don't really know, from an outside position anyway, how to fix it. Mom says there's been talk for a while of wanting to remove registering at the BMV just cause they fuck it up so often, but there's push back against that. No idea what to do about the mail, there's already several things in place meant to make it organized and efficient and they still manage to fuck it up bad.

The best advice I can give to the common voter is: Register well ahead of time, do not leave it to the last minute. Even if you think you're good, check in when it gets closer to the election to be sure your shit went through as it should have. Look into early voting in your area (mine has it basically a full month leading up to election day). Make sure ahead of time that you have whatever you need to vote, my state requires ID. Double check you know what's required (sorry lady, your son's high school ID card is not a valid form of voter ID).

I can only speak for my own location, but we really do try our hardest to make sure everyone who is eligible to vote gets to. And it's really hard that people don't trust us and don't want to listen to us when we're trying to help them because they think we're The Enemy.

[agreed-upon-solutions]

Why Direct Democracy?

(This is a lightly edited version of a reply to a question we received on Reddit, which we felt had independent interest here.)

We think direct democracy is preferable to a dictatorship for what I hope are obvious reasons, totalitarianism does not result in good outcomes (eg, the upcoming climate change fight is going to be insane).

We prefer it to the current United States government for what are also probably obvious reasons. Gerrymandering ruins the notion of representation within states, the senate means voters in Wyoming are represented 20x more than voters in New York, the supreme court means the opinions of nine unelected people make laws at the constitutional level that supersede the elected branches of government entirely, and there are many local optima in governing where the entire system just shuts down (see our ongoing difficulties keeping a funded government.)

The broad failure modes of representative democracy even in theory are also often terrible. A slight majority opinion is easily magnified into unanimous consensus at the policymaker level. In a single issue election, if something has 55% across all states, 100% of representatives will support it. With more issues voters don't even get a say in which ones, it makes protection of minority rights at the legislative level a joke. Institutional capture means often parties don't even try to represent their base: a majority of Democrats want a ceasefire in Gaza, but the party line is hard against it. There is no attention given to long tail issues, like plastic pollution or restrictions on advertising. Copyright reform has no supporters. (Tangentally, restrictions on advertising are a *hell* of a sleeper issue, it comes up more frequently than anything else we poll and opinions are uniformly negative.)

Direct democracy has the potential to solve an enormous number of problems, if various technical challenges can be solved. Extremely representative government is one aspect, but certainly not the only one. One of my favorites is that it has the potential to decouple every issue from needing a central party to make forward progress. It makes no sense that annoyance at trans people should also influence the antitrust enforcement priorities of the FTC. I believe the reason Donald Trump won is because although neither candidate represents a consensus bundle of issues, Harris missed the cluster that would have saved her.

There are also issues too unpopular at the national level to even be considered by a national party, but we could give them a fair hearing. An opinion of mine that falls into this bucket is that we should strive for full prison abolition, I don't think carceral justice is a concept that makes sense for the stated goal of "reintegrating the offender into society". With a national party system, I can't even get this concept on the agenda, with Agreed Upon Solutions I can just make my argument and have people vote. I will likely still lose, but I was at least given a fair shot, and any particularly reasonable points I can make might still be incorporated. Advocating for low maximum sentences for specific crimes certainly has potential to be agreeable.

Here are the main flaws that we see with direct democracy, and how we fix them:

* Difficulty scaling

* People are uninformed

* Suppression of minority rights

-

The scale problem I think you can see how we're approaching. Having a list of "Every Thing", as silly as it is, has dramatically increased comment participation over the open discussion, and solicited a lot of comments from what would normally be considered long tail issues. "Indigenous rights" is in our top 100 issues, I'm very proud of that. Our metrics look great, and we're very hyped for V2.

-

I will pretend like a representative democracy means we elect informed representatives, and that anyone at all has solved the problem of writing high-quality expert informed policy.

This is a subtle problem to fix, and we dedicate a lot of thought behind the scenes to it. We have a number of proposals; the most fleshed out ones center on the observation that while people may not be informed on a specific issue, they do have a reasonably good sense of who is. Given this observation, you can do tons of things: You can vote to reassign your vote to an expert. You can calculate something akin to PageRank for a given trust graph. You can use something like the ranked pair voting resolution method, (begin with the most strongly agreed on set of priorities, then add more recursively as long as the new position does not contradict the older ones,) using domain experts in a generic capacity. The promoters of AI claim it can also be used to solve this problem, but is an extremely unreliable technology for now and we don't want to depend on it.

The most ridiculous way would be if we can solve the enormous ballot ranking problem well enough, we can scale up again: We also have a list of Every Notable Person. It's about 6M entries, the vast majority of whom I have never heard of, so solving at this size is highly nontrivial. But, getting anything usable at all out of Every Thing was nontrivial, and we succeeded there even without a complete ranking.

There is a reasonable objection that this simply reinvents representative democracy, but I think the difference is academic. You are still expressing your individual opinions, and your individual opinions are being reflected in the final decision. Your opinion just happens to be "this person can answer these questions better than I can." It's a more expressive individual vote, not a departure from directness.

-

As mentioned above, representative democracy is usually terrible for minority rights, due to its conformity magnifying features. The "fix" for this problem in a representative democracy is to have some form of judicial review, essentially subjugating the entire democratic process to a handful of electorally unaccountable actors.

The problem with this idea is that there is no such thing as a non-political actor. Judges are also making political decisions, they simply claim that the legal political tradition (philosophies of interpreting laws, "judicial norms", etc) is somehow more objectively correct than that of the unwashed masses. If you believe that to be true, then only letting lawyers vote is a better system. This strikes me as a spiritual return to the philosophy of "only landholding males should be allowed to vote", which we believe has been conclusively rejected by history.

However, this area is where the twothirds system shines. It has strong built-in protections for minority rights, and the implementation methods we're looking at for the future make it even more robust.

-

Before I get more deeply into how that works, I'd like to clarify a point that's a bit too subtle to use in promotional posts: Traditional direct democracy and the twothirds system are not the same thing. The twothirds system is not total, meaning it does not always reach a decision. This makes it a kind of quasigovernment, which needs some sort of underlying mechanism that is total. This could be anything, from a dictatorship to an ad-hoc mess designed in the 1700s. This is where the existing United States government slots in: It's too large and carries too much infrastructural weight to be dismantled, it needs to be patched before major changes can be made. This notion of patching was the origin of the twothirds system: It's original design goal was to prevent the government from going off the rails, while simultaneously providing a channel where progress could always be made if the consensus was clear enough.

The twothirds system can be derived from first principles, if you frame the problem appropriately. We agree that simple majority rule is a *terrible* idea, and this fact falls out very naturally from the mathematics of the situation.

A government is a just a consensus algorithm. It is a process for taking pieces of text, and deciding "yes" or "no" to all of them. That's it. Using this capability, it is able to hire bureaucrats, purchase guns, and levy taxes; but all of them are organized exclusively through the ability to write down yes or no, and broadcast it consistently to everyone in the country.

This formulation of the problem of government suggests an analysis from the perspective of a distributed database. In this setting consensus problems have been extensively studied, and the gold standard for a given algorithm is known as "Byzantine fault tolerance", which measures how robust to manipulation a given system is for some number of malicious actors.

Let's pretend there are three parties, called Yes, No, and Screw You. Yes and No are attempting to have an honest debate over a yes-or-no question. Yes and No both respect each other's opinions, and both agree that their decisions should be made by voting. Screw You, on the other hand, is an actively malicious adversary. Screw You has perfect knowledge of the wrong answer, and it attempting to corrupt the outcome in any way they can. Screw You is allowed to corrupt some fraction of voters through mind control, making them do whatever causes the worst case outcome.

Your goal is to never make a mistake. You just detect the majority opinion of Yes and No wherever possible, but you must *never* allow Screw You to flip the outcome. There must also always be a way to make forward progress: Screw You should never be able to block a unanimous vote.

Some important notes: Screw You does not always vote for the worst outcome. Screw You votes to corrupt the system as a whole. If the system is reputation-based, Screw You may vote normally for a long period of time to gain access, then begin corrupting their vote. Additionally, Screw You does not need to choose the same people to corrupt for every vote. For any given vote, any subset of people may be compromised, assuming it is less than some predetermined limit; The goal of this analysis is to remain correct under as high a limit as possible.

These labels also do not have a moral dimension. Yes and No are the "correct" subset of voters, and Screw You absorbs the real world crap. These arguments are purely numeric, so defining "correct" is only a matter of making sure they remain a large enough fraction of the population. So for instance, if you wanted to propose a model where only voters with a certain level of information are "really qualified" to vote, but uninformed voters are able to get in, all you need to care about is whether or not the uninformed subset is smaller than the maximum threshold for Screw You. You are allowed to throw any number of voters under the bus for any reason, as long as the total number is below this threshold. Consensus algorithms are characterized by how large a fraction of the population can be Screw You before the majority opinion of Yes and No can no longer be reliably determined.

In a simple majority system, decisions can come down to 50.1%/49.9%. Screw You can control the vote with an arbitrarily small fraction of the population! This is why Democrats get so furious at the 0.4% of voters who went for Jill Stein, that 0.4% could be argued to have decided the vote.

Raising the threshold for agreement solves this problem, to a point. A 60% agreement threshold requires Screw You to control 20% of the vote to flip. But, if you make the threshold too large, Screw You regains power. A 99% threshold for agreement means Screw You only needs to control 1% of the population to shut down all progress on all issues.

It turns out the mathematically optimal threshold for decision making is the twothirds threshold. Screw You must control 33% of the population to control or shut down the vote. This can be strengthened a bit through pigeonhole arguments, Screw You cannot be the largest of the three parties. This is a reasonable assumption for all realistic scenarios, if it isn't then why are you surveying this population?

I like this system because it is maximally robust. There is *no* system that achieves a higher threshold of resilience, and there are theorems to back this up. If you elect representatives, then your threshold is a few hundred people. Money can easily corrupt the votes of a few hundred people, it's almost trivial. Right now it's so extensive that between the pressures of party politics and dependence on fundraising, politicians have almost no room to even attempt to do their jobs. They represent whatever makes them money. An "impartial" judge can take away minority rights just as easily as grant them. An "impartial" panel can do the same thing. A series of nested leaders, doing the most complex nested checks-and-balances dance you can imagine, will always be corruptible by controlling those involved. Appointing 3 million people would be an absurd number of people to assign to doing the tasks of representative government, and that's still only 1% of the population!

Consider the problem of trying to directly screw over a given minority. A directly elected representative system can fail at minority protection with 51% average approval. A gerrymanderable system can fail with 34%. A party system with mixed incentives can fail with 0%. The twothirds system always requires 67% before it reaches a conclusion.

Genocide should be controversial. If a call to genocide converges to agreeable, every other deterministic voting system in the world will have failed first. If yours doesn't, you provably got lucky on a nondeterministic coin flip: Screw You didn't decide to fuck you over.

Escaping this line of reasoning requires arguing that humans are straight up incapable of governing themselves: The more people vote, the less likely it is that the correct decision will be reached. In this view humans are animals, too stupid to organize for their collective benefit at all. In that case it's tragic that these animals are probably going to wipe themselves out, but ultimately the death of humanity has no moral significance beyond that of the death of crayfish. My life is ultimately a meaningless game, I can cross humans off my list, die, and not worry about it.

I don't believe that to be true, but the best system of government in that scenario is a dictatorship; this is Condorcet's Jury Theorem. I reject dictatorship, therefore I believe in the twothirds system.

[posttexasstressdisorder]

A breathtaking scam: Inside Georgia's newest voter suppression tactic

Thom Hartmann

August 2, 2024 12:07AM ET

Photo by Olesya Yemets on Unsplash

Republicans in Georgia have been champions at pioneering new ways to disenfranchise Democratic voters. Their latest scam is breathtaking.

First, the background.

When Georgia’s Republican Governor Brian Kemp was Secretary of State — the state’s top elections official — and running against Stacey Abrams for Governor in 2018, Abrams’ organization had registered 53,000 people (70% African American) to vote. Kemp put those registrations on hold so they couldn’t vote in the 2018 election, which he won by 54,723 votes.

But that was just the beginning for Kemp. By the year prior to the 2018 election he’d purged a total of 1.4 million voters from the rolls, claiming he was just removing people who’d died or moved. On a single night in July 2017 he removed half a million voters, about 8% of all registered Georgia voters, an act The Atlanta Journal-Constitution said “may represent the largest mass disenfranchisement in US history.”

ALSO READ: We asked 10 Republican senators: ‘Is Kamala Harris Black?’ Things got weird fast.

Investigative reporter Greg Palast hired the company Amazon uses to verify addresses and ran the names and addresses of those 534,000 people Kemp purged that July day through their system: 334,000 of them, most Black, had neither died nor moved. But they’d sure lost their right to vote.

Then Kemp shut down 8 percent of all the polling places in Georgia just before the election, the majority — recommended as a “cost saving move” by a white consultant Kemp had hired — in Black neighborhoods. Did I mention that he “won” that election by only 54,723 votes?

In 2020, when Stacey Abrams again challenged Kemp for the governorship, Kemp’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (pronounced “Raff-ens-purger”) purged another 309,000 voters from the rolls; Palast hired the company again and found that 198,351 of them had neither died nor moved.

It’s worth noting that if Brian Kemp wanted to take away a gun from any Georgia resident, Republicans on the Supreme Court have ruled that he’d have to go to court and prove his case; to purge voters from the rolls and take away their votes, though, Republicans on the Supreme Court have also ruled that Kemp doesn’t even need to notify those voters.

This year, Kemp signed a new law allowing any citizen to present a list of voters they believe must be purged from the rolls; one person, Marjorie Taylor Greene ally and Republican activist Pam Reardon, submitted a list of 32,000 voters, and the Chairman of the Ft. Benning area GOP, Alton Russell, challenged over 4,000 voters. A total of 149,000 voters were challenged by a handful of white Republican activists.

These tricks have helped keep Republicans in charge of Georgia politics, a state that would almost certainly be blue if every citizen were allowed to easily vote.

But there was some blowback to Kemp’s and Raffensperger’s “mass purge by vote vigilantes” strategy, so now comes Kemp’s latest trick.

This week Georgia rolled out a new website where people can let the state know they’ve moved (or their relative has died) and cancel their voter registration online. It’s super easy; you just plug in your information and, poof, your voter registration vanishes.

This would seem to be a solution in search of a problem. For example, over the past 50 years I’ve lived in Michigan, New Hampshire, Germany, Georgia, Vermont, Oregon, Washington DC, and then Oregon again: I never once let a state know I’d moved. Nobody does.

Instead, states track death records and the expiration of drivers’ licenses to determine who’s died and moved so they can then cancel registrations appropriately. My being registered to vote in both, say, Washington DC and Oregon when I only live in Oregon, is not a problem for DC if I don’t try to vote there. And nobody ever tries to vote twice just because they’ve moved; it’s a form of “voter fraud” that just doesn’t happen in any meaningful numbers.

But “keeping the voter rolls clean” — as if it were an urgent imperative making the wait for drivers’ licenses to expire just too dangerous — is the new excuse for Kemp’s Georgia website. Nobody’s believing the GOP’s “mass voter fraud” schtick anymore, so they’re reverting to this rational-sounding new way of getting Democrats removed from the voting rolls.

The problem with the new “cancel my registration” site is that bad actors, if they know a person’s name, address, DOB, and either Social Security or drivers’ license number, can simply go in and cancel other people they don’t want voting.

The “safety barrier” is that Republican activists who want to delete voter registrations in areas they know are heavily Democratic might be deterred from trying to do that with this new site, because they don’t have all that data on every Georgia voter.

Until this week.

For an hour Monday, the entire Georgia voter database — including names, addresses, dates of birth, and Social Security and drivers’ license numbers — was publicly posted on that very site. Oops, Kemp said! Anybody could download it and share it with others, including Republican activists who might want to keep on purging Democratic voters.

As the Executive Director of the Georgia Democratic Party said, “This portal is ripe for abuse by right-wing activists who are already submitting mass voter challenges meant to disenfranchise Georgians.”

When the Associated Press — which downloaded and printed out the list — showed it to the Georgia State Senate Minority Leader Gloria Butler, she was horrified, pointing out, “If someone knows my birthdate, you could get in and pull up my information and change my registration.”

This is nuts.

Vice President Kamala Harris has promised that if she’s elected president and gets a Democratic House and Senate, the first piece of legislation she’ll sign will be the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which will put an end to Kemp’s games in Georgia and similar Republican stunts across the nation.

If you think it should be harder to take away your vote than your gun, double-check your voter registration (especially if you live in a Red state) and show up this fall!

ALSO READ: We asked 10 Republican senators: ‘Is Kamala Harris Black?’ Things got weird fast.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

April 13, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

APR 14, 2024

There are really two major Republican political stories dominating the news these days. The more obvious of the two is the attempt by former president Donald Trump and his followers to destroy American democracy. The other story is older, the one that led to Trump but that stands at least a bit apart from him. It is the story of a national shift away from the supply-side ideology of Reagan Republicans toward an embrace of the idea that the government should hold the playing field among all Americans level.

While these two stories are related, they are not the same.

For forty years, between 1981, when Republican Ronald Reagan took office, and 2021, when Democrat Joe Biden did, the Republicans operated under the theory that the best way to run the country was for the government to stay out of the way of market forces. The idea was that if individuals could accumulate as much money as possible, they would invest more efficiently in the economy than they could if the government regulated business or levied taxes to invest in public infrastructure and public education. The growing economy would result in higher tax revenues, enabling Americans to have both low taxes and government services, and prosperity would spread to everyone. 

But the system never worked as promised. Instead, during that 40-year period, Republicans passed massive tax cuts under Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump, and slashed regulations. A new interpretation of antitrust laws articulated by Robert Bork in the 1980s permitted dramatic consolidation of corporations, while membership in labor unions declined. The result was that as much as $50 trillion moved upward from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. 

To keep voters on board the program that was hollowing out the middle class, Republicans emphasized culture wars, hitting hard on racism and sexism by claiming that taxes were designed by Democrats to give undeserving minorities and women government handouts and promising their evangelical voters they would overturn the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion. Those looking for tax cuts and business deregulation depended on culture warriors and white evangelicals to provide the votes to keep them in power.

But the election of Democrat Barack Obama in 2008 proved that Republican arguments were no longer effective enough to elect Republican presidents. So in 2010, with the Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission decision, the Supreme Court freed corporations to pour unlimited money into U.S. elections. That year, under Operation REDMAP, Republicans worked to dominate state legislatures so they could control redistricting under the 2010 census, yielding extreme partisan gerrymanders that gave Republicans disproportionate control. In 2013 the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision greenlighted the voter suppression Republicans had been working on since 1986.  

Even so, by 2016 it was not at all clear that the cultural threats, gerrymandering, and voter suppression would be enough to elect a Republican president. People forget it now because of all that has come since, but in 2016, Trump offered not only the racism and sexism Republicans had served up for decades, but also a more moderate economic program than any other Republican running that year. He called for closing the loopholes that permitted wealthy Americans to evade taxes, cheaper and better healthcare than the Democrats had provided with the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare), bringing manufacturing back to the U.S., and addressing the long backlog of necessary repairs to our roads and bridges through an infrastructure bill. 

But once in office, Trump threw economic populism overboard and resurrected the Republican emphasis on tax cuts and deregulation. His signature law was the 2017 tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy at a cost of at least $1.9 trillion over ten years. At the same time, Trump continued to feed his base with racism and sexism, and after the Unite the Right rally at Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, he increasingly turned to his white nationalist base to shore up his power. On January 6, 2021, he used that base to try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. 

Republican senators then declined to convict Trump of that attempt in his second impeachment trial, apparently hoping he would go away. Instead, their acquiescence in his behavior has enabled him to continue to push the Big Lie that he won the 2020 election. But to return to power, Trump has increasingly turned away from establishment Republicans and has instead turned the party over to its culture war and Christian nationalist foot soldiers. Now Trump has taken over the Republican National Committee itself, and his supporters threaten to turn the nation over to the culture warriors who care far more about their ideology than they do about tax cuts or deregulation.

The extremism of Trump’s base is hugely unpopular among general voters. Most significantly, Trump catered to his white evangelical base by appointing Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, and in 2022, when the court did so, the dog caught the car. Americans overwhelmingly support reproductive freedoms, and Republicans are getting hammered over the extreme abortion bans now operative in Republican-dominated states. Now Trump and a number of Republicans have tried to back away from their antiabortion positions, infuriating antiabortion activists. 

It is hard to see how the Republican Party can appeal to both Trump’s base and general voters at the same time. 

That split dramatically weakens Trump politically while he is in an increasingly precarious position personally. He will, of course, go on trial on Monday, April 15, for alleged crimes committed as he interfered in the 2016 election. At the same time, the $175 million appeals bond he posted to cover the judgment in his business fraud trial has been questioned and must be justified by April 14. The court has scheduled a hearing on the bond for April 22. And his performance at rallies and private events has been unstable. 

He seems a shaky reed on which to hang a political party, especially as his MAGA Republicans have proven unable to manage the House of Representatives and are increasingly being called out as Russian puppets for their attacks on Ukraine aid.  

Regardless of Trump’s future, though, the Reagan Era is over. 

President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have quite deliberately rejected the economic ideology that concentrated wealth among the 1%. On their watch, the federal government has worked to put money into the hands of ordinary Americans rather than the very wealthy. With Democrats and on occasion a few Republicans, they have passed legislation to support families, dedicate resources to making sure people with student debt are receiving the correct terms of their loans (thus relieving significant numbers of Americans), and invested in manufacturing, infrastructure, and addressing climate change. They have also supported unions and returned to an older definition of antitrust law, suing Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple and allowing the federal government to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies over drug prices.

Their system has worked. Under Biden and Harris the U.S. has had unemployment rates under 4% for 26 months, the longest streak since the 1960s. Wages for the bottom 80% of Americans have risen faster than inflation, chipping away at the huge disparity between the rich and the poor that the policies of the past 40 years have produced. 

Today, in an interview with Jamie Kitman of The Guardian, United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain, who negotiated landmark new union contracts with the country’s Big Three automakers, explained that the world has changed: “Workers have realized they’ve been getting screwed for decades, and they’re fed up.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[jack-bytez-genuine-corner]

For reference but Gen Z hasn't, as a colloquial term for people aged roughly 17ish to 27ish, lived in a Western country not undergoing massive decline. In the UK it was the 14 years of Tory rule which culminated into tons of privatization, stagnating wages, privatization and eventually Brexit that all but collapsed UK relevance but simultaneously made life for everyone living there consistently worse over time. France, Germany and a few other EU nations have been in a brutal fight between ultrarich interests, Russian and China interference in elections, politicians and energy, while simultaneously dealing with high xenophobia and bigotry which bogs down both local and EU politics which has led to issues in health, housing and a decline in high, stable wages. Once you hit the US you get a culmination of all these issues alongside some I haven't said like how many governments are gerontocracies where a lot of these politicians are so old and out of touch that they can't even comprehend the technology of today but you also have our baked in structural issues like the Electoral College which lets land win over popular vote, Supreme Court which can and regularly does throw out any law and legal precedent it disagrees with, gerrymandering and voter suppression being legal and preserved through generations of inaction, basic rights only being gained in the most tangential stance due to how impossible it is to federally pass anything and codify rights which can be anywhere from "Tossed out by SCOTUS" to "Requires 2/3rds of both houses." The forced 2 senator model keeping land in power over people so it's true in both state and federal systems, the over 20 year wars from Dubya that has led to a mass decline in respect towards soldiers and absolute failure on that entire institution to make it seem like it's anything but official soldiers for hire which will bribe you to kill innocent people and even die in exchange for an education, broken body and broken psyche if you live, giant differences in state law which near universally leaves all workers overworked and underpaid while companies can immorally stop unions and fire their workers with zero reason nor recourse, finally topped with barely existent safety nets that are always one or two steps away from just not existing at all.

But what does this actually MEAN? Well Gen Z is unionizing more, getting more politically active, becoming much more critical of existing institutions, not to kill those institutions off but to actually make them work. We see this in the UK kicking out the Tories after 14 years of direct financial and institutional decline in favor of Labor. We see this in France relegating the far right Le Pen led party to 3rd in power while the current Macron led center is 2nd, while the progressive party is leading forcing a coalition between business as usual and actual change. While in the US I can't point to recent elections directly I can point to the rise in ballot initiatives to save abortion in many states which, if the current bans remain in place, would force doctors who perform a life saving abortion to go to prison or stay in their job while women died, alongside preventing the complete loss of OBGYN services to millions, the growing support for queer people, the creation and resurgence of many unions, talks and actions on political and court reforms to prevent corruption, alongside the steady losses for Republicans in every election in every state since 2018, with 2016 being the first time that Gen Z could vote while millions every 4 years can start protesting at the ballot box vs just in schools which has led to groups for gun reforms and a complete shift on work back to a much older view on work than our nationalist version we've had for over a century.

At it's core, every action has an equal or opposite reaction. You can count me as optimistic that after decades of decline we're going to see decades of fixing many wrongs to make a better world cause the old people of today didn't want to plant a tree they'd never live to see grow, and that's because we've hit a generation who has no nostalgia for the days of old and are patently aware of the issues. I'm pretty hopeful, but I can still be wrong I guess.

being unemployed is rad but being unemployed in a world that treats employment as a necessity that completes you as a person while also having zero access to unemployment benefits is maybe not so good

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jay Kuo at The Status Kuo (10.25.2024):

A major difference between our democracy and autocracies around the world is that our military is not something that the president can use against his internal enemies. Our military is traditionally non-political, and that has kept us from being ruled by a junta or a strongman because such a dictatorship would need the military’s cooperation to impose and keep martial law in place. That has been the line left largely uncrossed since 1878, when the Posse Comitatus Act was first passed. That phrase refers to a group of locals mobilized by the sheriff to suppress lawlessness in a county. The Posse Comitatus Act prevents troops from being used this way on orders of the President.

Today, we’ve reached a dangerous inflection point, where that safeguard could be easily circumvented by Donald Trump should he be reelected. He has long promised to go after his political rivals, whom he now openly labels “enemies from within.” And he has made recent suggestions that he could use the military or the National Guard to suppress dissent. But it goes even further than political retribution. Trump and his cronies have plans for the military that, once implemented, would render America wholly unrecognizable as a liberal democracy. Today, I’ll discuss the origins of Posse Comitatus Act and how Trump might get around it using something called the Insurrection Act. Then I’ll note a few key ways Trump has threatened to use the military under the Insurrection Act if he becomes Commander-in-Chief again. This next time around, heaven forbid it should really happen, there won’t be any institutional guardrails or cooler heads in the room to keep him from doing so.

A dark origin to an important limitation

When we consider the principle that federal troops should not be used to enforce the will of the White House upon its political opponents, it seems a noble and good idea. But at the time this law was enacted, like so many other parts of our history, the record contains some hard and bitter truths.

Prior to the statute’s enactment in 1878, federal troops were used in many ways we would find repellant today. These included persecuting indigenous populations along the frontier and capturing and returning fugitive slaves. President Rutherford B. Hayes signed the bill into law following the contentious and disputed election of 1876, when Hayes became president through a brokered deal that saw the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, thereby ending Reconstruction. Those troops, however, were the only thing keeping the Southern states from suppressing their Black citizens, who had recently been freed from slavery following the Civil War. 

Without federal troops in the South, the white majority quickly disenfranchised Black voters and instituted a racial caste system under Jim Crow. Millions of Black lives were suddenly without federal protection, and terrifying local mobs and lynchings became commonplace in order to enforce white supremacy and white rule. Also during Hayes’s term, labor unrest grew around the country as economic conditions deteriorated. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 began after local militias fired upon striking workers, and as tensions mounted, the National Guard, supported by federal troops, was called in to suppress the striking workers. Over 100 people were killed in the ensuing violence. The passage of the Posse Comitatus Act the following year prevented federal forces from being used to put down such labor unrest.

[...]

Trump’s love for the Insurrection Act

Trump is a big fan of the Insurrection Act, which is something of an amalgam of acts passed between 1792 and 1871. I’ll get to what the Insurrection Act actually says a bit later, but first I want to discuss how enamored Trump was of the statute during his first term. During the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, Trump frequently raised the notion of invoking the Insurrection Act to quell unrest triggered by the killings of George Floyd and other Black citizens by the police. The last time it had been invoked was in 1992. President Bush had invoked it to quell violent riots in Los Angeles following the jury acquittal of police assailants of Black motorist Rodney King. But Trump’s own generals and advisors balked at the idea of Trump invoking it in 2020, worried that he would use it as a pretense to stoke further violence or even impose martial law. They worked furiously behind the scenes to keep him from being able to deploy troops.

Indeed, his own Defense Secretary, Mark Esper, was so concerned about what Trump would do with active duty federal troops from the 82nd Airborne Division, which had been stationed near D.C., that he had them sent home to their base in North Carolina “as quickly as possible.”

[...]

Invoking the Insurrection Act is too easy

Given Trump’s stated intention to invoke the Insurrection Act, it’s worth reviewing what it actually says and permits. Under that law, the president can create an exception to the Posse Comitatus Act and call in U.S. armed forces and the National Guard under three circumstances:

when requested by a state to address an insurrection against that state;

to address an insurrection, in any state, which makes it impracticable to enforce the law;

to address an insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination or conspiracy, in any state, which results in the deprivation of a constitutionally secured right, and where the state is unable, fails or refuses to protect those rights.

As an initial problem, the Insurrection Act doesn’t define what an insurrection is. When the statute has been interpreted by the courts, they have tended to expand presidential powers and allowed the White House to decide whether conditions to deploy the military have been met. Trump getting to decide when Trump gets to use the military is a frightening thought. Also, go back now and read that last bullet point once more. You’ll quickly understand that there doesn’t have to be any actual “insurrection” or even violence in a state for the president to invoke the Act. In theory, there just has to be a “conspiracy” that threatens a constitutional right, where the state has refused to take action. You can see how this could get twisted quickly in the wrong hands. As president, Trump could falsely claim, as he already has as a candidate, that migrants are making a certain blue city unsafe, but that “radical leftists” in the state government are allowing it to happen as part of a conspiracy to create more Democratic voters. Under the guise of protecting ordinary citizens from such dangerous enemies, Trump could send in federal troops to blue cities.

Trump has also said he’ll be a “Day One” dictator, meaning he could invoke the Insurrection Act on his very first day in office. If that sounds insane, imagine this not so far-out scenario: Trump begins to gin up rumors of violent protests around his inauguration, so he drafts a standing order to invoke the Insurrection Act on Day One to address “civilian unrest” and then signs it as soon as he gets to the Oval Office. The military clashes with protestors, and some citizens are killed. The “violence” then justifies even greater troop presence. Rather distressingly, there’s nothing in the law that can stop Trump from doing that, once again because the drafters of the Insurrection Act over the many decades probably could never have imagined it being abused in this way.

But Trump won’t stop there. He wants to deploy U.S. troops, if needed, to round up undocumented immigrants and lock them inside militarized camps. He says he will begin with “the criminals,” but how will federal troops determine who these people are? Is anyone who looks like they might be an immigrant and who travels inside the United States without “papers” suddenly suspect?

This should scare a lot of people: If Trump gets back in, he’ll use the Posse Comitatus Act and the Insurrection Act to clamp down on dissent.

[ramrodd]

BREAKING: Democracy Wins in Wisconsin, Alabama and Utah 

 COMMENTARY:

The important lesson woke Biden/Harris voters need to learn from the Conservative focus on voter suppression is how obsessive that focus is as it connects to how the butterfly ballot was created to steal elections for Republican candidates by confusing geriatric voters with ballots specifically designed to confuse people my age. ‘Any thing out of the ordinary is stressful for me. Leaving my room is stressful for me, Everything is a triathlon and I don’t want to fuck with it. But, I also know its good for me, so I gird my loins and go by bus to do things. It’s a bullshit attitude, but I feel I’ve earned the privilege of avoiding hassles .

And voting can be a hassle in the booth, DC has a great voting through put system, The have early voting, their ballots are complex but not complicated and the graphics are clean and enlarged for everybody, As an Eisenhower Republican, that’s the way universal franchise is supposed to work for the processes of the US Constitution to be able to constantly improve the personal standard of living, globally, I’m a process theology guru and I thrust process. the DC voting process, for me in Adams Morgan, is excellent, I voted in person where I live now in each election since 1982. But thinking about everything connected to getting into the booth is stressful and performance issues rise in the booth, And this was going on in Broward County before the Republican clerk of the vote introduced the butterfly ballot and the percentage of spoiled ballots caught the eye of activists like Roger Stone and Newt Gingrich and the fact that the system didn’t care about spoiled ballots, generally, and the expectation that seniors were more likely to produce spoiled ballots from performance anxiety, Hence, the butterfly ballot, Does any actually believe all those Holocaust survivors voted for Pat Buchanan. They had heard his shit before and it was not even a no-brainer for them, it was a Hell, NO! Brainer for them, Yet, Pat Buchanan won Broward County and Bush/Cheney took us into Iraq. For all intents and pruposes, the butterfly ballot was a Project 2025 operation, The RNC has been staffed by the same lawyers who enforced the steal until the Fascist SCOTUS majority ratified the stolen vote. It is essential to connect Trump with Project 2025 and William F. Buckley’s “Negro Problem” rebuttal to James Baldwin’s BLM proposal. And essential to connect Biden to Camelot and BLM, James Baldwin is talking Critical Race Theory and Biden has always been about as BLM as a white person can be from the Boomer generation, And BLM is totally DEI and DEI is the social contract of the Declaration of Independence. BLM/DEI is the reason to keep Biden/Harris. That’s what passing the Torch of Camelot from us Boomers to Gen Z looks like constitutionally, That’s what Biden is selling/ KD Harris is no Harry Truman, Nixon was probably the most prepared person to be POTUS when Eisenhower had his heart attack in 1955, Eisenhower wer re-elected in 1956 and Nixon got four more years experience in a staff that circulated aroung the man who ran D-Day, KD Harris has been part of Biden’s Build Back Better capital budget since before January 6, Everybody in NATO is pleased that John Bolton is not longer an influential voice in the actual operations of American national security, Biden’s biggest burden, internationally, is that he inherited Hillary Clinton’s Russian narrative, which is a Bush/Cheney legacy and congruent with Bill Kristol/Robert Kagan/John Bolton Project for the New American Century, which is the foreign policy element of Project 2025 and justifies the Free Market hegemony of the war crime of the Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Just Cause. Project 2025 is all about the Conservative legacy of stealing elections and, in particular, stealing this election by election fraud or January 6 violence all over America.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

DON'T YOU QUIT!

TCINLA

JUL 13, 2024

If the Cretin News Network Baby-Kissing Competition two weeks ago was the bottom of the campaign to date, President Biden conclusively demonstrated with his speech last night in Detroit that the Baby-Kissing Competition was a one-off “bad night.” This speech was the top, the definition of a “barn burner.”

The speech was give at a rally at a high school gymnasium in Detroit. Biden walked on stage to audience chants of “Don’t you quit!”

In the speech, President Biden pitched his plan for the first 100 days of a second term with a Democratic Congress:

Restore Roe v. Wade.

Eliminate medical debt by having the government buy up such debt and cancel it.

Raise the minimum wage.

Protect workers’ right to organize.

Ban assault weapons.

Continue to “keep leading the world” on clean energy and addressing climate change.

Sign into law the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would end voter suppression, and the Freedom to Vote Act, which would protect voter rights and election systems, as well as end partisan gerrymandering.

Biden reminded the audience that he was the first president to walk a picket line, because “when labor does well, everybody does well.”

“When Trump comes here to tell you how great he is for the auto industry, remember this: when Trump was president we lost 86,000 jobs in unions. I created 275,000 auto jobs in America. In fact, what’s been true in the auto industry is true all over America: since I became president, we created nearly 16 million new jobs nationwide, 390,000 of those jobs right here in Michigan. We’ve created 800,000 manufacturing jobs nationwide, including 24,000 in Michigan.”

Forcefully contrasting his own record with Trump, who he called “a loser,” Biden said, “Donald Trump is the only president in American history, other than Herbert Hoover, who lost more jobs than he had when he came in. That’s why I call him Donald ‘Herbert Hoover’ Trump.”

Biden also brought up Project 2025, the policy plan written by the Heritage Foundation on how to install a right wing dictatorship in the first 180 days Trump is in office.

Pointing out the calls in the document to criminalize the shipment of abortion medication, deny contraceptive coverage, make cuts to Medicare, and eliminate the Department of Education, he went on to say, “Project 2025 is the biggest attack on our system of government and our personal freedom that has ever been proposed to this country. We’ve never seen anything like this. It’s not a joke. It’s time for us to stop treating politics like entertainment and reality TV. Another four years of Donald Trump is deadly serious. Deadly serious.”

He ended with a joke about his age, saying “I know I look 40”, telling the crowd that “with age comes wisdom. I know how to tell the truth, I know right from wrong, and I know I have demonstrated how to do this job.”

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes called the speech “the best performance Biden’s given since the State of the Union”.

What was the response of the “Democratic elites” to the speech?

The New York Times reported that so long as Biden remains the nominee, major donors will put on hold “roughly $90 million in pledged donations”.

Let’s remember that among the Masters of the Universe, aka the “Major Donors” of the Democratic Party are the financial geniuses who keep funding the artistic antics written by, directed by, and starring George Clooney (“The Monuments Men” anyone? How about “Leatherheads”?), master of all those “Nespresso” ads.

Despite the Press Corpse, there was good news for Biden yesterday: polls show him improving since the Atlanta Baby Kissing Competition, and that there was no great loss in support after that - other than among the collection of clucks in Washington who remind us that Mark Twain’s 1873 observation: “Consider a congressman, then consider an idiot. Bah! I repeat myself!” is still true.

The NPR/PBS/Marist poll released Friday shows Biden leads Trump 50%-48% in a head-to-head matchup.

Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, the dean of the Congressional Black caucus, told NBC that Biden “sometimes mangles words and phrases but all of that is almost natural for people who grew up stuttering. He has one of the best minds that I have ever been around … and so I would hope that we would focus on the substance of this man … and how he has run this country.

Asked by the reporter “Is this the same Joe Biden that we saw four years ago?”, Clyburn said: “No! I’m not the same Jim Clyburn that I was four years ago and in ten days I’ll be 84. But I’m a bit wiser than I was before … It’s biblical. When I became a man I put away childish things. Joe Biden has put away childish things because he has become a man. His opponent is still a child.”

Charlie Pierce said of Biden’s press conference on Thursday: “I was wavering. I admit it. But I’m not anymore. That was a president onstage on Thursday. But I’ve watched the dynamic of the past two weeks play out time and again. It chased Bill Clinton for eight years and it chased Al Gore for eight months. Clinton survived, barely, and Gore lost an election to trivia and some really horseshit reporting from the campaign press, which, in combination with the Florida Hijack, gave us the previous Republican Worst President Ever.”

According to The Clinton Rules, which the D.C. Press Corpse has followed ever since the Lewinsky “scandal,” once The Story is birthed, no matter which set of ratfuckers or bad reporters are its midwives, The Story must be kept alive. There will always be another document, another “issue,” another set of questions leading to Clouds and Shadows over the politician in question.

What continues to piss me off is that this time there are dozens of Democratic political geniuses (looking at you, Axelrod and Plouffe) and Masters of the Universe who continue to push their bullshit regardless of what President Biden does, none of whom seem to have any idea what they want beyond forcing the incumbent president off the ticket.

And this morning the 538.com forecast has Biden winning 51 to Trump’s 48.

President Biden's full speech in Detroit