spujbThe Trump administration has made drastic cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that threaten to impact weather forecasting (headline from four months ago)
*dust.sysI can’t do shit about that in Pennsylvania. You’d think there would have been more an effort to disprove the allegations sometime between 1865 and now.
There are rights organizations that work across state borders for these causes. Not trying to shame, just putting out there that there are outlets for your talents, time, money, or even just verbal support.
CatoblepasGuess what! People in the south frequently can’t do shit about it either. If you would like to blame this on the people who live there for not voting correctly, please explain to me what you think ‘gerrymandering’ and ‘disenfranchisement’ mean, and what the average person living in the south is supposed to do about this shit being greenlit by SCOTUS.
Boomer Humor DoomergodThey got guns, don’t they?
You are maybe being sardonic but you’re touching on a real poignant issue that’s worth investigating.
Notice how the NRA conveniently backs the oligarchic state? The average NRA member owns something like 17 guns. That is, they can afford 17 guns. NRA members are wealthy.
This is not an accident. Poverty has been weaponized to keep the majority-white, upper to middle class the ones that are armed, while the working class, the people of color, queer people, women, migrants, tend to be less armed and less able to organize.
Of course these are all trends, or tendencies, not hard and fast rules (plenty of Black or Queer Texans own guns), but on the whole, and especially in combination with a militarized, capital serving, police force it had a real dampening effect on ability to resist oppression.
TrickDacyBoth things can be true: vote manipulation measures and voters choosing horribly.
The victims of the vote manipulation aren’t a random accident, it’s mostly leaving Republican voters standing by design. If legislation swept through other states that put the same voting requirements and gerrymandered districts as a lot of southern states have in place, they would probably also start to become real Republican shitholes without anyone’s values or voting patterns changing.
I’m not sure what you mean but I still stand behind people having choice while also they’re being pushed to choose poorly.
And every time a city tries to do something good, the state steps in and stops it. This happens daily in Birmingham, Alabama where the state is constantly overturning things the city has passed or the state takes the ability away from the city.
Do explain how gerrymandering affects the presidential election. All votes are counts for the entire state.
I get that it affects local elections. That is obvious.
That’s actually easy.
The shape of the district gets decided based on the concentration of votes for one party. The goal is to make enough districts with enough concentration of your voters that you always win those districts, and make the rest of the state have few enough districts with enough of a mix of of voters for both parties that A) the for-sure districts can’t be lost and B) the not-for-sure districts can never oppose the for-sure districts as long as they remain under your party’s control.
So all the rigging party needs to do is campaign enough in the for-sure districts that they can’t lose, and campaign enough in the not-for-sure districts that their opponent can’t win. And then because of the Electoral College, all of the states votes go to the rigged party.
Indirect influence versus direct consequence
??? But as the OP said that’s not how Presidential elections work. Gerrymandering does not affect presidential elections at all.
As he already said, it affects local elections like Congressional districts.
*with the exception of Nebraska and Maine, who use proportional allocation of electoral votes based on districts.
Distribution of Electoral Votes
Allocation among the States Electoral votes are allocated among the States based on the Census. Every State is allocated a number of votes equal to the number of Senators and Representatives in its U.S. Congressional delegation—two votes for its Senators in the U.S. Senate plus a number of votes equal to the number of its Congressional districts. Under the 23rd Amendment of the Constitution, the District of Columbia is allocated three electors and treated like a State for purposes of the Electoral College.
ZagorathNot proportional. FPTP per district.
no one claimed gerrymandering affects presidential elections, not directly certainly. but local regressive policies and disenfranchisement also hurt oppressed people daily; that’s why all three are up there.
(one could make some pretty valid connections between local elections and lobbying money going towards national campaigns, so we can discuss that if you want but just to keep it accessible and evidence based for now)
The fact that Hillary Clinton can get nearly more votes and lose in 2016, and how Al Gore won the popular vote against George W. Bush in 2000 and somehow Florida, where the governor at the time was Jeb Bush, held significant power in deciding who the next president was going to be, is kinda fucked.
technically the electoral college and gerrymandering are not the same thing, but yeah i would honestly totally agree that the EC belongs in the list of oppressive forces in the meme (i stole the post otherwise i would edit it lol)
I feel less sympathetic for many conservative states than this image would encourage, but even though gerrymandering doesn’t impact presidential elections directly it does impact state legislatures who then control the rules around presidential elections.
Every vote is counted, which is why there’s focus on voter suppression. If your legislature decides to make it harder to vote in liberal or more densely populated areas, voter turnout will naturally skew conservative. Same for shifting requirements to focus on criteria less often met by demographics that don’t support you, or changing the criteria for purging the voter registry and making it harder to register.
Every vote is counted, which is why there’s focus on voter suppression. If your legislature decides to make it harder to vote in liberal or more densely populated areas, voter turnout will naturally skew conservative. Same for shifting requirements to focus on criteria less often met by demographics that don’t support you, or changing the criteria for purging the voter registry and making it harder to register.
Reminder that most states, while the majority may have gone for one candidate or the other, were still mostly under a 60/40 split
The States with the most landslide victory for trump where all northern states, Wyoming, West Virginia, and North Dakota, and even those were just 70/30 splits.
Thats many people who did not want this president. The South is not some unanimous bloc
Sometimes seeing the numbers is the most meaningful! Even in a 70/30 state that’s still 3 in 10 people who didn’t ask for this—maybe more if, as is sometimes found, Democrats gain more votes when polls become more accessible.
Thanks for sharing!
Gerrymander secretary of state race
Geryrmander governor race
Gerrymander state Senate and house races
Pass disenfranchisement rules and laws
…? Profit
Geryrmander governor race
Gerrymander state Senate and house races
Pass disenfranchisement rules and laws
…? Profit
Read a bit of the Kemp wiki and found this unrelated gem:
“Georgia was one of 14 states that used electronic voting machines that produced no paper record, which election integrity experts say left elections vulnerable to tampering and technical problems”
Well. I see no problems that could arise from that 😑
I mean, technically still not any gerrymandering in the presidential elections. Just making sure we understand what the word means. Otherwise we can extend the meaning to say something like: poverty leads to zoning of the empoverished which leads to gerrymandering. That doesn’t mean that poverty = gerrymandering
pelespiritDo explain how gerrymandering affects the presidential election. All votes are counted for the entire state.
Do explain how disenfranchisement works.
Also, if you don’t understand gerrymandering, here is a great article.
Different word, different meaning.
In the same way that a toilet bowl full of shit may still contain undigested food fragments, sure. Doesn’t mean I’m going to scoop up a pitcher of poo-slurry and put it in the fridge for later. There’s a whole journey of processing into fertilizer and growing new crops that would have to happen before you get any value back.
thank you for proving exactly why this posts exists. class consciousness, not culture war.
Given the luxury of that choice, I’d be right there with you but sometimes we just have to fight the war that is waged upon us even if that means stepping down off our high horses to do so. “At least I was polite” won’t do me much good when Jim-Bob and Jethro (between moonshine-fueled arguments over whose turn it is to get their sister pregnant again) blow my head off for being a filthy Yankee.
These backwoods redneck pieces of shit you describe are the fucking scum of the earth. It’s frustrating how they live in their own little white trash world, forever insulated from the consequences of their actions and beliefs. They have the state, the church, and their community enabling them in their ignorance. I wish I could pluck one of them out of their sleepy little mudhole town and drop them in the bay area and watch them have a fucking aneurism after being treated the way they treat outsiders.
Most folks in the south are good, honest, hard-working people - but the levels of propaganda aimed at keeping people ignorant and blaming minorities for systemic issues are hard to overstate. That coupled with a crumbling education system, poverty, and voter suppression is what keeps the south voting against the best interests of the majority of folks.
The average Southern voter is just trying to do the right thing with the information they have access to.
It always makes me sad when I see people in Left spaces saying things like “it serves them right” etc etc when disasters occur. Sure, the majority of voters may have voted for policies that caused these things, but they are ignorant and have been lied to their whole lives. Not to mention all the folks who have been disenfranchised by the system.
Yeah, someone told me yesterday that the people in Kabul deserve to have no assistance, “because they chose the Taliban”.
I mean, that’s certainly a perspective.
It’s just hard to swallow that people choose to ignore reams of facts they have access to because they “disagree” with them.
I lived in VA. From 2nd to 9th grade pre-internet. Now VA. Is South but it’s not west va., Mississippi, or Tennessee south. Even back then, you could spend an afternoon in a library and alleviate yourself of a lot of bad information unintentionally just by looking up that information. I know because I did. I’d hear grownups around me say sketchy shit and look into it. It’s even easier to do so now. Just the act of seeking clarity can bring some small pieces of enlightenment. A lot of people didn’t bother then and wouldn’t now.
What’s happening is post-truth BS. People just choosing to believe whatever the fuck they want, often without any verification.
Are some people being led astray? Absolutely. But they’re also allowing themselves to be. People have been trying to convince southerners (and others) for decades, of not a century, that they’re being screwed over and the people they vote in are doing the screwing but many just flatly refuse to look into it at all and just keep going on blind faith. What happened to personal responsibility and self-agency? Not to mention that some people are just dumpster fires given human form and those people definitely deserve to reap what they sow.
I don’t wish hardship on anyone but if a person continually brings hardship on themselves through their own, thoughts, votes, and actions, while ignoring all the warnings being handed out like candy at Halloween, I don’t find it surprising that others feel less inclined to be sympathetic let alone empathetic with their plight.
It’s because most people are intellectually lazy.
It’s far easier to believe trusted sources than look things up yourself.
While that may be an explanation. It’s no excuse.
Obviously not. Why would you feel the need to say that?
No. Hard stop NO. Ignorance is no longer an acceptable excuse. They all have access to the same internet as the rest of us and all have the ability to verify the things they see and hear. Most choose not to.
I’ll accept gerrymandering and some other hard physical barriers but ignorance and lack of education is no longer acceptable.
Critical thinking skills are essential for that, and they stopped teaching that a long time ago. It’s not enough to have access to information, you have to have the skills to judge and interpret it. This is why misinformation is such a problem, people literally don’t have the skills to distinguish between it and actual facts
Nobody ever taught me that either but I figured it out. I wish this didn’t need to be taught at all.
I am going to assume you went to a public school, yeah?
It isn’t the schools’ responsibility to give you every damn skill necessary to be a functioning adult. We keep trying to put the blame somewhere where it doesn’t belong.
agamemnonymousWho’s responsibility is our? The parents? The ones who were themselves indoctrinated? The point of mentioning schools is to say that the reliable baseline of public education isn’t so reliable anymore, so all they have is propaganda filtered through their parents and community.
It’s not about placing blame, it’s about diagnosing the causes and devising a fitting solution.
randintThey do not have access to the same internet. Just see how Facebook’s algorithm decides what to show you based on your IP and usage history and a bajillion other factors. And how Google changes the search results based on IP too. They don’t choose not to verify the things they see; those things were presented as the truth to them in the first place.
So what you’re saying is they can vote to fuck up the country and suppress other peoples freedoms. They can vote to instill pain fear and chaos in other peoples lives. But when the consequences of their vote bites them in the ass all of a sudden we need to have empathy and grace? Libs like you are why we are in this mess with fascism to begin with.
So? When the Internet exists to easily see the proof of reality, they are not blameless for taking in lies
BS, unless they’re illiterate.
I solve this by not liking anyone anywhere.
I don’t care about the color of your skin, your gender identity, your sexual identity, your political identity, what country your from, or your legal status here, I hate all humans equally, I just want to be left alone.
<freeze frame>
Narrator: And that children was the prophet who taught us to hate equally and mind your damn business.
im a progressive because i want nazis to have healthcare
and im a liberal because i want them to need it
that’s totally okay! this is the politics community not the “who do we like” community lol
knighthawk0811i guess, but they voted for that too
the voting rights act was only in 1965. in a significant number of cases, no they did not
the 19th amendment was in 1920. in a significant number of cases, no they could not
it is demonstrably harder to vote if you are poor and harder to vote informedly if you are poor and educated all the way through 2025. no they did not vote for this.
thank you for proving exactly why this posts exists. class consciousness, not culture war.
Those examples are from 105 and 60 years ago.
There are ways to make the point you’re going for, but invoking legislation that old doesn’t do it.
Am I sympathetic to people who are ignorant and so voted against their own interests? Sure, a bit. A lot of southerners would take issue with trying to defend them with cries of "don’t blame them, they’re too stupid to agree with me!” though.
Am I sympathetic to people who have been systematically disenfranchised and economically abandoned? Of course, I’m not a monster.
The fact remains that a lot of people in red states earnestly believe in what they vote for. You can talk about class consciousness all you want, but the people fighting the culture doing so because of manipulation by the rich or powerful in a class war does fuck all to help the people loosing said culture war. I’m sure the suicidal trans kid takes great comfort that the people voting to make them illegal are just misled.
They’ve had every opportunity to inform themselves. Maybe eventually they’ll hurt themselves enough to stop fighting the culture war you don’t want others to fight.
60 years isn’t even close to life expectancy. so we are talking less than a lifetime ago. MLK’s daughter is alive, 62 years old (younger than most people in government) and posting on instagram about the same struggles her father fought.
plus did you even read the part about ongoing class disenfranchisement in 2025 (poor people being kept from voting)?
not even reading the rest of your comment since you couldn’t do the same for me. thanks for being such a genuine participant in this conversation.
I did actually read your comment, I just didn’t entirely agree with you you condescending ass.
MLKs daughter never voted without the civil rights act. You forgot to add 18 to the age someone would need to be to have voted before the act passed.
Most of the southern electorate is neither 78 or older, or even 60.
The point was that it’s not a convincing argument, not that someone isn’t alive who was impacted.
I’m not sure what class disenfranchisement has to do with the part you’re angry about. Maybe if you actually read what I said you’d have seen where I mentioned it for the rest of the comment.
If you’re not even going to read what people say, you have no grounds to complain that people aren’t “being a genuine participant”.
thanks for the personal attack i guess lol you are so cool online wow so cool
still you act like 60 years is some kind of insurmountable gap in history and that’s so cringe. the echoes of slavery and native american genocide echo from before 1776 through today. MLK didn’t magically die and then fix every barrier Black people suffered in life. that’s pretty basic history lol.
I’m not sure what class disenfranchisement has to do with the part you’re angry about.
all of it you silly goose. disenfranchisement means “depriving someone of the right to vote.” when the poor are depreived of the right to vote (not directly by law, but indirectly by systemic barriers), it means shocker they don’t vote. this entire thread is in response to someone saying “i guess but they voted for that too.” that’s the context you butted into, i operate on the pretty fair premise that you knew that and read the thread. :)
Who said the lingering effects of slavery didn’t have an impact? You said the voting rights act and universal suffrage being recent meant that a lot of people in the south were disenfranchised before them, hence they couldn’t vote for the way things are. Most people in the south did not have their voting rights impacted by policy before those to effect because they weren’t alive.
That’s why I didn’t say systemic racism doesn’t exist, or that economic or political disenfranchisement doesn’t exist, I said that those aren’t compelling evidence to make the valid point you’re going for. I then proceeded to talk about other stuff related to your post, which you would know if you bothered to read instead of assuming that anyone that didn’t entirely agree with you must be disingenuous.
That’s why I didn’t say systemic racism doesn’t exist, or that economic or political disenfranchisement doesn’t exist, I said that those aren’t compelling evidence to make the valid point you’re going for. I then proceeded to talk about other stuff related to your post, which you would know if you bothered to read instead of assuming that anyone that didn’t entirely agree with you must be disingenuous.
hence they couldn’t vote for the way things are
and still can’t. voter repression still happens. in 2025. said it before. you ignored it. brought it back up again. you called me an ass. said it a third time, and you called me bad faith.
i gave a timeline of problems (A B C) and you ignored the most recent, most relevant, date in the timeline © three times. three times you ignored C. just to be clear. my point is C. the current ongoing crisis is C. C is the issue i am concerned about in making this entire post. C is proof that the progress of A and B has not come to fruition.
thank you for your time.
Can you point out where I said it doesn’t? Are you even actually reading?
You act as though I railed against the notion of voter suppression when one sentence said one part of what you said wasn’t compelling for the point you were making.
I didn’t ignore your point, I fucking agreed with it a few sentences later. I called you an ass because you angrily said you didn’t read the reply after one sentence and accused me of being disingenuous.