Yeah, I literally just stop replying when they trickle in. Rather plant seeds and move on than get bogged down by Putin's trolls.

Yes. Clearly it is undemocratic for the person who won the last presidential election to sit as an incumbent.

🙄

That's not unusual at all. What's unusual is for a small publisher like 404 to demand an email address before letting you view their articles. Personally, it means I don't read them.

Do we want free articles on the internet? Like we've had for the past 30 years until some publications decided in the last 5 years to start paywalling everything?

Yes. Yes I do want free articles on the internet. And once upon a time, publishers actually wanted my eyeballs on their free articles.

It could also just be propaganda. They're pirates, not us!

Are you maybe a privateer?

Privateers tended to obey a sovereign government and do all the pirate things, but directed it against the enemies of the country they were under the flag of rather than just at whoever. Privateers would sometimes become pirates, though. Basically, they'd just keep doing the same job, but for themselves.

The distinction is largely one of who gets to make the rules and do the finger pointing.

Why would you want people to stop talking about disenfranchisement? States deciding to take the vote away from their citizens after they've been convicted is something we should absolutely be highlighting. You'll even notice there's a significant correlation between which states are consistently redder and which have greater rates of voter disenfranchisement.

Maybe what we need is clarification about what disenfranchisement is, because it's not just people deciding not to vote. It's people having their ability to vote taken away.

Its failure to what, though, exactly? Go by the popular vote?

There are definitely problems with our democracy, but I don't think an electoral college automatically disqualifies it. I'd love to see it gone, because I don't think it's representative, but the argument behind it is one of broader representation rather than narrow representation.

The idea is that life in the population centers of the US and life in rural areas is very different. We've got a fair chunk of our population living in the middle of nowhere, but they're dwarfed by the population of our cities. By dividing votes by state, it keeps the most populous states from constantly determining the course of the less populous states on a federal level.

The alleged intent is to give those less populous states an opportunity to be involved in the discussion of our federal government. As you've probably noticed, laws vary wildly from state to state in the US. Instead of one consensus on law in general, we have 50 mini-consensuses. There are states that literally will refuse to enforce certain federal laws, or that will refuse to honor the laws of other states.

So our presidential electoral process looks very similar. It's not one consensus, it's 50 mini-consensuses. Because the votes happen at the state level, you can win a popular vote and still lose the state-by-state vote. That's not it being broken, that's it functioning as intended.

This model of state and federal government honestly works pretty well for us in a lot of cases. It allows states like Massachusetts, California, or Washington to go ahead and try some new stuff that other states are hesitant about. It's why we've got things like ACA, marriage equality and other protections for queer folks in some states, and it's why marijuana has been legalized in a lot of places. Unfortunately it's also why Texas and Florida are dystopian hellscapes, but it does insulate the people in these more progressive states from a bit of their nonsense.

Unfortunately we also have a lot of gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement going on that makes the situation worse. But even in a really bad situation, you're going to have states that protect people from some of the worst of it.

It's democracy, it's just not direct democracy at a federal level. It's representative democracy that focuses on an alliance of 50 states rather than running it like one big thing.

If we want to challenge the legitimacy of American democracy, voter disenfranchisement and the ongoing persistence of legal slavery are probably a better place to start.

Russia really has us fucking sideways.

I have a weird feeling that most of the shit going wrong in the US right now is going to turn out to be down to Russian interference.

I'm not sure that the electoral college precludes qualifying as a democracy. Voter disenfranchisement certainly seems to put a wrench in the idea though.

Probably not. But I also live in Massachusetts, which hasn't voted Republican since Ronald Reagan.

I typically vote in every election. I think I might have missed a mid-term or two in the past couple decades. Maybe more than that, but I haven't missed a presidential election and I've always voted Democrat.

If we had ranked choice I'd probably be more into some leftist third-party, but it is what it is.

I'm pretty sure everybody I know is voting for Biden even though like half of them at least don't approve of his policies. Specifically, every leftist I talk to is against his continuing to give arms to Israel, but recognizes that Trump would make things much, much worse.

I think he's going to win by a pretty wide margin. Political polling is fundamentally flawed and self-biasing other than at exit polls. The media is trying to make Biden look like a confused old man, but he's got enough on the ball to listen to the people he's put in charge and to get a good read on the situation. He doesn't have to micromanage everything, he needs to know how to delegate, which he clearly does.

That's part of the problem with the current ways of looking at politicians in the US, especially the office of the president. We look at this one figure head and just see like, their personality. As if they're going to wake up in the morning and just wing it based on their gut instinct. I'm sure Trump does that, but most presidents have advisors that they actually listen to and that actually have qualifications.

Biden is a decent president because his VP and his cabinet are decent. He could literally die in office and we'd probably have nearly the same policies.