Oh my, did poor little aryan superman just get bitch-slapped by the Invisible Hand of the Marketplace?
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Wow. What can I say about this quote: “Nobody calls Mexicans and blacks and Chinese ‘Nazis.’ They only call white people ‘Nazis.’”
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Maybe that could have something to do with Nazis hating/plotting against everyone who isn’t White, straight and “Xtian.” Just maybe…
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Of course you should show up…
…but my rebuttal is that A of all, just “showing up” isn’t going to cut it, because the people you need to be fighting are doing everything they can to prevent enough people from showing up and to diminish their impact when they do. And…
… second of B, that’s a woefully lackadaisical response. We’ve had only nine months of this presidency being allowed to “run its course”, and the country is a trash fire. The WH is being run by openly racist serial-liar incompetents, most of the West Wing is likely facing indictment, government agencies are being run by ideologues openly hostile to the mandates of those agencies, and the whiny manchild Cheeto Czarushka in the Oval still has a 37% approval rating. So yeah, you do need to change some minds, because that’s not low enough for impeachment, that’s not low enough to win the House or Senate back, that’s not low enough for the GOP cowards in Congress to wake up and act against the gravest threat to the Republic since 1865.
The white supremacists are a minority. It’s not as small a minority as you think. And they don’t need to not be a minority to start a war, or to gain power, or to convince a government sympathetic to their cause to invoke policy that gets people killed. Because that just happened today.
“We outnumber them, we needn’t worry, let things run their course.” – Far too many people in Germany, the UK, and the US, in 1932.
This particular racist’s bar didn’t get shut down because “people showed up” and “things ran their course”. This racist’s bar got shut down because a free press was still able to do its job, and then only because dozens of people had the bravery and integrity to quit their jobs even though they aren’t sure they’ll qualify for unemployment benefits. This is a tiny tiny victory, one of only thousands that will be needed, and it required dozens of people to show up, stand up, draw a line in the sand, and collectively do something at significant personal cost.
The current course runs the country off a cliff. It cannot be allowed to run.
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That only feels like its rigged because we wrongly believe that the presidential election system is supposed to be “plurality wins,” which it isn’t. It was always set up to give a little extra voice to low-population states, and you can’t do that without creating the possibility of the winner of the popular vote fairly losing the election.
The same system that gave us Bush and Trump gave us Bill Clinton and Obama, and all four won because people showed up to vote for them in sufficient numbers and in enough places.
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And I say nuts to that. Low-population states already have other advantages ensuring their voices are heard. For example, a Wyoming voter has over 67 times as much influence in the Senate as a California voter.
Bill Clinton and Obama still would have won if the election had been decided by popular vote.
Anyway, if the electoral college is so great then why isn’t it used for other kinds of elections? Every single state in the country elects its governor by popular vote. I don’t see anyone proposing that we change the system so voters who live in sparsely populated counties get a bigger say in the outcome than voters who live in big cities.
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Because it IS rigged.
Gerrymandering and racial voter suppression are real obstacles.
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And I say nuts to that. Low-population states already have other advantages ensuring their voices are heard.
I don’t disagree, I’m just saying that our electoral system is what it is, and the myriad problems aren’t due to rigging.
Bill Clinton and Obama still would have won if the election had been decided by popular vote.
Irrelevant. If the elections had been rigged, they would have lost. We have lots of examples of rigged elections throughout the world, and there are probably rigged local elections in the US, but the idea that the US presidential election is rigged is a fantasy shared by Trump, Jill Stein, and few people in between.
This came up in this thread because people were pointing out the importance of showing up. Obama is an excellent example of what happens when people show up. Trump is an excellent example of what happens when people don’t show up. The idea articulated above, that because the system is “rigged” there is no point in showing up, is a bullshit argument.
These have been significant problems for state and congressional elections, much less so for electing presidents and senators. Even in a gerrymandered district, I think showing up is important, and if a district has obstacles in place like racist poll ID laws, showing up (and not giving up) is even more important. (1000 people turned away at the polls is a harder problem to ignore than a dozen people turned away at the polls.)
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You say the electoral system is designed to ensure low-population states have more representation than they would if the Presidency was decided by popular vote.
I say the electoral system is rigged in such a way that some Americans’ votes are worth a helluva lot more than others.
Po-tay-to, po-tah-to.
Just because it’s possible for a particular party/candidate to win the election doesn’t mean that the system isn’t rigged in such a way to create an unfair disadvantage for that party/candidate. That would be like saying the existence of Oprah Winfrey is proof positive that our society doesn’t put black women at an inherent disadvantage in the world of business.
That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying it’s more difficult to convince people to show up when they are justifiably concerned that the system is unfair.
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Nobody articulated that argument that I can see. It was articulated that it is important to show up and also that the system is rigged.
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I never said nor even implied otherwise.
I don’t vote because I truly believe my vote actually matters; whether it does or not depends on the powers that be and their ‘whims.’
I vote because my ancestors fought and died for the right.
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Your statement implies that it is impossible to consider the existence of the Electoral College itself to be a form of rigging the system. In that it was designed explicitly with the purpose of weighting some votes more heavily than others, I would suggest that to consider it such is not only possible, but entirely reasonable.
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All of which is totally NOT my point. My point is that we can beat them at the ballot box, because they are a (significant) minority. If you want to claim doom and gloom, fine, have at it. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the next 3.5 years. But I know we can beat them in the elections, if we do something. Like these people in Minneapolis did.
What’s your point? That voter suppression justifies many voters staying home, or supporting an unpopular candidate?
Two things can both be true:
- There is voter suppression
- Many voters do not vote.
One does not depend upon the other. Unless, of course, the voters are staying home because OTHER voters are being suppressed. Is that what you are saying?
It can create an unfortunate cycle, yes. The more voter suppression that takes place, the more likely that some voters will choose to stay home because they are convinced the system is hopelessly rigged against them anyway.
I agree that even in a rigged system choosing not to vote is not a winning strategy, but I disagree that the dual problems of low voter turnout and unfair voting systems are wholly unrelated.
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Huh?
Your statement implies that it is impossible to consider the existence of the Electoral College itself to be a form of rigging the system.
Obviously it is possible to consider it to be so, as at least 2 people on this thread already do so, but it is not historically accurate. You can find Alexander Hamilton’s arguments in support of the College in any public library, and they are quite clearly well-intentioned and not designed to favor one party or group. (In fact, one part of the design was to help prevent someone like DJT from becoming president.)
It is a design with transparent intended consequences, and lately some bad unintended consequences. You might as well say our system is “rigged” against the Greens because FPTP voting strongly favors two-party dominance, and by the Hotelling Theorem tends to favor parties in the middle of the spectrum. The part after “because” is a true artifact of our system, but it isn’t rigging. If we start using the word “rigging” whenever we choose a structure, regardless of intent, then it renders the term meaningless.
The Electoral College was a compromise, and like all compromises it is deeply flawed and probably outmoded, but it doesn’t merit the same word that we’d use for insider trading or a prizefight where a combatant is paid to take a dive or Diebold machine manipulation.
No, it really does, and anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is not your friend.
I live in a state with a densely populated left-leaning capital city. The rest of the state is rural, sparsely populated and conservative. Thanks to gerrymandering, I share a voting district with a city over 3 hours away from me. The capital city has been carved up in a way that keeps me from being able to elect anyone that represents me in a meaningful way or who works in the interest of urban areas. As a result, the city residents suffer from terrible pollution, because the people living in suburbs and rural areas aren’t interested in enviornmental reform, and they don’t have to live in it.
I vote in every single primary and election, but nothing ever changes.
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You’re missing the point; which is that I vote, regardless.
Neither are most random people on the internet who pontificate as if they have all the answers; but that’s beside the point, yet again.
Just because I show up to vote in every election does not mean that the system itself is not rigged.
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It’s not just voting. There are other things people can do to demonstrate that Trumpism is a significant minority, and those who allow it will not be tolerated.
As for people choosing to stay home because they are convinced the system is hopelessly rigged against them, do you think that’s what happened in WI, FL and PA? In other words, what got Trump elected?
“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good (people) to do nothing.”
