I'm watching Bad Bunny perform on the TV (I'm a bar writing), and it's awesome and it's reminding me of how batshit it is that puerto ricans can't vote in federal elections in the US
what ... what is the putative argument for that? I mean know the actual reason is a historic and *radioactive* level of racism on the part of the republican party, but ...
... what's the polite reason, given out loud by supposedly Veddy Serious People?
TL;DRH we never wanted to be a state, the gringos who stole our land never wanted us to be a state, and Spain back-stabbed us.
by us, i mean the working classes, not the landowning managers of La Corona & gringolarchy.
so we’ve been in a limbo, sometimes bombing you gringos with guerrillas or musicians.
as it stands: way before owing us independece, USians owe us reparations; ie: Puerto Rico is taíno land denied to millions of us gaslighted about not surviving genocide
yup.
in USA, because of “state rights” (which are extended to territories) you have 2 political relationships :
1. the federal CITIZENSHIP
2. the state or territory RESIDENCY
so, when you move across state or territory lines, you can’t immediately vote in your new locality. you can vote in federal elections if resident of the 50 + G̶u̶a̶m̶, but if you move to & become a resident of La Isla or US Virgin Islands, you can’t.
folks always forget the USVIs.
@blogdiva @fromjason @gbargoud @clive @rejinl I didn’t realize the USVI don’t have federal voting rights. Why is that? Are they a different kind of territory?
@ramsey @fromjason @gbargoud @clive @rejinl read the info at the link
@gbargoud @fromjason @clive @rejinl @blogdiva Oh, wow. I thought they all had the ability to vote in federal elections because they’re full citizens (except for American Samoa, which I had no idea they aren’t full citizens).
@gbargoud @fromjason @clive @rejinl @blogdiva Now that I think about it, I guess this is all a result of the Electoral College. Since they don’t have full representation in Congress, they don’t have Electoral College votes, so any federal elections they vote in wouldn’t be counted.
@clive big picture? US government is so ossified now that basically nothing big can ever change or happen, for example, I'm quite sure there will never, ever be another constitutional amendment passed. The last real one was in 1971 (lowering voting age to 18) and that was really about opposing the Vietnam war:
Our government seems to be slower and slower at delivering change due to the increased polarization of our two party system. The last meaningful constitutional amendment we’ve managed to pass in the last 60 years was the 26th amendment in 1971, lowering the voting age to 18 and giving more people a voice in our democracy.
@codinghorror @clive I think I first understood this after watching “An Unreasonable Man,” (the Ralph Nader doc) which described the circling of the wagons by the two parties in the US after the presidential run of Ross Perot. The parties walked away from democracy and into the arms of the donor class because it was advantageous to maintain a duopoly.
America should end, and nonsense propaganda like the "American dream" is part of what keeps it from ending. The American Dream is a pleasant fantasy for people who lucked out and it kills the rest.
@clive this ossification, and the way people in so many rural areas were getting completely screwed, decade after decade, explains why they voted for the baseball bat. It's an extremely brute force instrument, and I really wish it didn't have to be that way, and I don't agree with the methods... but what other option does a highly polarized two party system offer to them? They have no way out. None.
@clive @codinghorror as my 15 year old pointed out from her apush class: George Washington warned us about the risks of a two party system.
@codinghorror @clive hmmm, this seems to have missed out on the past year in politics, not to mention the previous 8. Blaming a two-party system kinda overlooks the Epstein-class, billionaires buying elections, right-wing takeover of media, and huge flows of money and wealth away from the working class. But yeah, go on about a two party system.
@claralistensprechen5th @clive @jeffmcneill all the data shows that a highly polarized two party system is the most perilous, least stable form of democracy.. and..
Aha, that's a great point, and a great essay -- thank you!
Ironically, the poem that "stay gold" refers to was by Robert Frost, and it's ... deeply, existentially pessimistic about the ability of anything to say gold lol: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/148652/nothing-gold-can-stay-5c095cc5ab679
he had a sort of entropic view of morality
I mean, *sort of*: Frost was an old-school self-reliance, the constitution-is-paramount conservative
Is suspect he'd be 100% livid at the behavior of today's republicans, and the white house
@clive don't agree; it's a challenge and a reminder, not a death rattle
@clive call me if you want more. I have so much more, but I can't talk about all of it here.
I will do that in the near future!! I am currently in the final throes of writing the first draft of a reported piece about how LLM coding tools are affecting the way software is written/maintained ...
... which is likely something you HAVE THOUGHTS ABOUT 😂
you can tell I'm deep in the first draft because I'm i) at a bar, writing, while ii) also dicking around on mastodon
aha, okay!
that's good to hear
I've been reading it very pessimistically for years, but i like the idea of seeing it another way
