For conservatives the law exists to protect them but not restrain them while it restrains <everyone else> but not protect them. Can’t have the law in the wrong hands.
Probably, yes. The idea is that people should have adequate representation. If 45% of your area if X, and 55% is Y, and it’s a direct election, then you end up with all elected officials being Y, and X has no representation at all. The ideal districts would result in 45% of all elected representatives being X.
The electoral college is based on population, but indirectly. The way you could get around it is if states awarded electoral votes proportionately to the votes a candidate received, rather than winner-takes-all. But states have to choose to do that themselves; the fed. gov’t can’t mandate it. Some states are already doing that.
…But the electoral college is population based. That’s why California has 55 delegates, and Wyoming has 3. Slaves have nothing to do with it now.
The issue is that most states do a ‘winner takes all’ approach. If, for instance, Texas voted 49.9% Democratic, and 50.1% Republican, then all of their 38 delegates would be pledged to the Republican nominee (…and the state legislature would pass laws restricting the ability of Democrats to vote). That was how Trump won in 2016, despite not winning the popular vote. OTOH, Biden won the popular vote by a comfortable margin, 51% to 47%, but won the electoral vote by a larger 56% to 44% margin.
As a Canadian, the more I read these kind of news about the USA, the sadder I become about the country and feel that these social issues will never be fixed
Yeah, the only way the south ends up changing is if a genocide happens, which I’m not advocating, but it really is like that with them and their “culture.”
…more than half of all Black folks in the US live in the south. Georgia alone has over two million Black folks living there (hi, I’m from Georgia and I’m Black!) I’m Southern. My whole family is Southern. I’m the first generation who didn’t grow up on a farm. This isn’t my damn culture. Don’t erase us in your zeal to smugly dismiss the South, when there is not a single damn state in America that didn’t have a sundown town.
Yeah, I wasn’t talking about black people or black culture. I meant more that the racists are gonna stay that way unless war starts down there again, but this time they just all get killed off so there is no one left to spread the culture.
But half the South is Black. By just referring to “Southern culture,” you’re both completely erasing half the population in many places and reinforcing the idea of white as default. Call it what it is: evangelical white Southern culture. Don’t let the real identity of the folks being racist dipshits get erased.
Yeah, that’s pretty close to what I was thinking: racist white Southerner culture (not to be confused with racist white Northerner culture). I just call it “racist white” because evangelical sounds religious to me, and I’m pretty sure other religions/denominations are racist too, so I wanted to be more inclusive & just lump all the racist white southerners together.
But if you wanna get into it… southern culture IS white culture. It may have been heavily influenced by other ethnic groups, but it was built by white people for white people, and even more specifically, Christian white people.
Do you remember Kunta Kinte? Cause every time I hear black people say southern culture is black culture I hear Kunta saying “yes massa my name is Toby.” It’s the culture you have, but your culture was stolen & erased generations ago, and now you defend the culture of the slavers.
Evangelical + white + southern = racist. White + southern =/= racist. Evangelical + southern =/= racist (because black people can and are evangelical).
Also - dude, it’s super racist (and misogynistic!) to be telling a black woman what her own experience is. You might want to reconsider that.
Sorry… where do you think soul food comes from? Who created it? Is that not part of a unique culture?
And then there’s other things dominated by Southern black people. Zydeco music in Louisiana for example. Most Zydeco musicians are black. Isn’t that part of a Southern black culture?
I’m not black, I’m not Southern, but I can recognize unique cultural elements when I see them.
White Southerner here. Southern culture is NOT all white, and most of us are actually aware of that.
When I think of southern culture I think of southern hospitality and sweet tea, neither of which are limited by race.
I’ve lived on 3 continents and every culture has individuals that are racist. By far the worst was when I lived in a homogeneous Asian country - people felt the constant need to stare and comment (and because I’m white they were trying to say NICE stuff) and it made me so uncomfortable. I have no idea what it’s like to be black, but I got a glimpse of how people will made dumb assumptions about you based on your skin.
The biggest key to defeating racism is melting the pot further - which the South is doing. Yes, there are plenty of racists here, and plenty of racists communities, but I can guarantee you they exist elsewhere too. Fighting it only happens when we confront it.
John Oliver did a great bit on school segregation that goes into how racism isn’t a Southern issue.
I’ve been around too, and the place I felt the most uncomfortable was every time I’ve been in the South, specifically around the white people in the South.
The “southern hospitality” comes off fake as fuck btw. I’ve seen the confederate flags. I know how y’all vote. I see your representatives & what they say.
When y’all think southern culture y’all think hospitality & sweet tea: I think Try That In A Small Town by Jason Aldean, voter suppression, lynchings, and Emmitt Till.
To be honest, I think it’s easiest to feel sentiments like “There is no racism anymore” when you’re in a completely homogenized culture. eg, a Japanese person living in Japan, or a white person in Poland (the latter was a common critique for the monoskin designs of The Witcher). Those people don’t ever even need to confront the question of racism.
In a way, that at least means the ideological “war on racism” is only being fought in multicultural areas like the South - where minorities at least exist. It’s harder to identify whether that means it’s “worse” than other multicultural areas.
I feel similarly about the flags. At worst, I try to remember that even if 10 people on a street fly confederate flags, it’s likely some of them wish for slavery, while others just have jaded, disillusioned ideas that it vaguely represents independence and national pride.
“Waaah, our gerrymander failed! This is so unfair, it was supposed to be used to suppress black voters! Not white voters! We want all our white people back, since they failed to properly police the black people like we had hoped!”
This is the shit that I think about when I hear people say “slavery and Jim Crow were a long time ago”. The selective blindness of people is just astounding
Believe it or not, you're the one being racist now - by painting all of the US and all Americans with the same brush.
You don't hear about all the people that are perfectly fine folks and all the places that aren't insane because that makes boring news. So the only news you hear about are the whackjobs and bottom-feeders like this.
Don't make the same mistake of judging an entire country by a partial set of facts because that puts your feet on the first steps of the same path the people in this article walked.
Yeah, maybe? Humans do tend to do dumb things because other people are doing it. Mob mentality is one version of it. I’m sure seeing other people downvoted could trigger others to see the negative first, therefore downvote.
Not to mention sheer numbers. Like, the higher EU user numbers are, the more people you might find that would defend EU & see USA more critically than Americans would. Just like in an American user heavy server, you might expect to find more users that would start defending USA & lashing out at other countries.
It can’t It would have had to have been true in the first place to be any less true. Being false you cannot be any less true no matter how bad the falsehood was.
This would be nationalist if anything, or generalized prejudice, as “American” isn’t a race. Though, to be fair, all racism is a misnomer, as our race is human, but still.
Prejudiced yes. Racist? No, American is not a race. And yes, I agree that to really know the USA, you need to visit many of its states, but the current state of the country doesn’t invite many of them to visit.
The problem, as Cody suggests, isn’t visiting them, it’s visiting them and treating them like shit. Littering everywhere, disturbing habitats, going off trails… That’s the problem. If you stick to the path to the waterfall that’s already well-worn, that’s different.
I also like his point that we act like those were pristine and untouched lands when actually huge numbers of people lived and maintained them before Europeans arrived. They just knew how to keep the land in balance with nature when they exploited the resources.
Perhaps American police agencies should start investigating themselves more and the papers should 100% just believe all their findings. That way you can just conveniently ignore it until the next time an American has to point it out to you.
Remember kids! If you just pretend the racism doesn’t exist in your country, it doesn’t!
I get you but then you’d never go anywhere, I’ve recently come back from the states and it was a great trip - all the roads near where I was staying were lined with beautiful trees, houses had great front gardens many growing vegetables, there were lots of vegan and vegetarian restaurants, endless pride flags well into July, lots of friendly cultural events, I felt welcome whenever I went and mixed with a diverse community in various settings. Weed is legal and sold at very reasonable prices… It was a lot more progressive and interesting than most places in my own European country or others I’ve visited, certainly on par with even the cool sections of Berlin, Barcelona, Bristol. It would be crazy missing out on visiting Baltimore just because you heard there are some especially shitty racists in the country it’s part of.
I really hope this kind of shit is pissing people off as much as it does us. It sure riles me the fuck up, and at a minimum serves as a reminder to keep voting.
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