Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/09/05/free-speech-with-consequences.html
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This kinda confirms what I’ve thought for several months: That racists, Trump supporters, etc. are a minority, and we don’t need to change minds to beat them. We just have to let things run their course without getting too crazy.
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Did Duke not have any secretive PACs in his corner to protect his donors from public disclosure? I mean, most of the time nobody bothers to look, but if you’re the candidate who’s openly trying to be the political arm of the nazis and the klan, you’d think it foreseeable that someone might.
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However we do need to organize to beat them. They may be a minority but that didn’t stop them from taking control of the goddamn White House.
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Exactly. We need to organize to beat them. They are a minority who won the White House because Dems were not organized and united. You know how to beat a minority? Show up.
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Seems to be a trend: http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/08/31/boycott-closes-popular-santa-cruz-restaurant-owner-defends-david-duke-donations/
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It also helps if the system isn’t rigged in favor of the minority. Recall that the last two Republican Presidents took the office despite the fact that more Americans showed up to vote for their opponents.
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Expecting a thrice-rigged system to work correctly is like expecting to be able drive a car that has no battery in it.
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It also helps if the opposition doesn’t nominate an extremely disliked candidate. It helps if the opposition shows up, rather than sits home. What was the voter participation rate, again? Can you really call a system “rigged”, if people refuse to show up, when they have the option to do so?
But, back to the story: A lot of people showed that they don’t like White Supremacists. If a lot of people care that much about voting, we can accomplish things.
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*With no other additional effort, aside from turning the key.
Perhaps.
But, I’d call it rigged if you lose by more than 3 million votes but still get the office.
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Again, more people DID show up to vote for Hillary than Trump (or any candidate in history other than Obama). More people DID show up to vote for Gore than Bush. All across the country people DO show up to vote Democratic in districts that are gerrymandered in favor of Republicans.
Showing up is critically important, but it’s a lot harder to convince people to do it when the system is rigged in such a way that the winner often isn’t determined by which side gets more people to show up.
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I live in South West Minneapolis, which might as well be the Twin Cities’ equivalent of Marin County in the Bay area.
I used to drive past the beautiful Mid-Century modern house on my old commute home, and then one day there was a Trump sign out in front of it. It was the only Trump sign I’d seen in all of Minneapolis proper, and probably one of the 10 I saw in total. I looked up the tax information on the place and it was this guy’s house.
A quick google of his name 6 months ago returned some pretty eyebrow - raising stories. This guy should have gotten his due long ago.
“That’s good Aryan stock,” Jaegar de Roma noted approvingly (2008).
Incidentally, a relative of mine was a regular at Jager - seems like all the 3rd-party organized events brought many customers have left for other locations.
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Good to the good power:
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Well, yeah, of course you can. Because those two things have nothing to do with one another. Poor voter turnout doesn’t mean that extreme gerrymandering and systemic and racially-targeted voter suppression isn’t happening and doesn’t have an enormous impact. And that’s true even if you think that improved voter turnout might be able to compensate for those things in some scenarios.
Indeed, given that part of the thing that makes the system rigged (systemic and racially-targeted voter suppression) is part of the reason that people don’t show up, I would suggest that you are at least in part insisting that we pay attention only to the symptom and not the cause.
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Ok, fine. What should we do? Not show up?
My point is, there is a remedy. Let’s use it.
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Over priced average Chinese food anyway,
