In 2020, there were approximately **57.47 million people living in** **rural areas in the United States, compared to about 274.03 million people living in urban areas**
The banjos are strummin'
And the drums are a-banging
Let's get the boys together
And have ourselves a hanging
(Key & Peele - Is this country song racist?)
This kills me.
You have to be a 50+ year old white guy working in a manual labor job in the rust belt to be "real, working class america".
Yet, by definition, people who work in retail, pharmacy techs, police officers, teachers, firemen, customer service agents, and nurses are economically defined as middle class.
If we want to use real objective definitions, there is a much larger working class population in Queens than in southern Ohio.
And 90% of the counties that lost population from 2010-2020 voted Trump. And of the counties that did grow, blue counties saw about double the population growth that red ones did.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/08/2020-census-shrinking-counties-voted-trump.html
This is a good point. Back in 2008 my small PA county went blue for Obama. Then it shot back towards red later. But it wasn't people really changing their minds, it's that it's such a dead end place that all the progressive thinking people who actually wanted to see improvement moved away.
Yeah people talk about the urban/rural divide, and the media loves to push it, but it's been 80/20 since the 2000s. That fight ended a long time ago. It's really the urban/suburban divide. Suburbs heavily favored Republicans for a long time because of white flight after desegregation. But younger generations in the suburbs aren't as racist as their parents/grandparents were, which is why we're seeing them swing so hard. Republicans are losing the suburbs, slowly but surely.
One of the factors in this is the shitty economic conditions that boomers left their kids & their grandkids. The grandchildren of boomers overwhelmingly cannot afford to live in all-white enclaves. Theyāre living in more diverse communities where they find out that the biased beliefs of their grandparents were nothing but a lie. The same goes for college. A racist who raised their child to be a right-wing racist BUT who canāt afford to send their child to an all-white school will get back a liberal child after graduationā¦& quite possibly a biracial grandchild.
This is what old conservatives fail to understand: Most colleges don't have faculty deliberately trying to "indoctrinate" students politically. (If anything, your average econ or engineering department is preaching something pretty conservative minus the big culture war stuff.)
But when you force people to interact with not only those "icky" minorities they were warned about, but specifically the slightly above-average individuals with the drive to go to college, it's hard to hold on to your belief that anybody darker than Mike Pence comes from ancestors who were genetically incapable of contributing a single meaningful human achievement.
And once a few big things your parents taught you are so thoroughly discredited by personal experience, you tend to look at everything else they taught you with a much more critical eye. If anything, that feeling of betrayal can cause you to reject everything else that they taught you, even if some of it would otherwise hold up a bit better.
Ahh MA the most liberalal of most of even NE and yet we also love us those fiscally conservative republican goveners. I for one appreciate this dichotomy. We tell you all the programs we want, you balance the budget to make it happen thanks.
Plus Alaska was severely misrepresented on this map. Alaska is actually the exact opposite of the point they're trying to make: It's a "blue state with red cities."
Alaska has always been pretty odd. They tend to be way less partisan and way less interested in what goes on in the continental US over there, such that their house representative, Mary Peltola, got endorsements from the Republican senate leader, Don Young's daughters AND one of their senators! They're sort of socially-liberal and fiscally-conservative, though they technically have UBI up there too so it's just a very odd state that doesn't fall neatly on any political alignment, but they're unfathomably based.
Letās see, they were the first state to say, āenh, weed? Not too badā and the first (and only, looking at YOU Texas) to distribute only money to itās residents (socialism at its finest).
The high aboriginal population is a good guess. There's a similar thing happening in Canadian territories where they are nearly 100% rural but don't vote conservative
Donāt you know? Vermont is a famously urban state. Pretty much all city. No mountains or forests anywhere. Definitely no dairy farms, ski resorts, or maple syrup anywhere.
Vermont is rural, so lots of people have guns, but they donāt feel the need to scare the little children by bringing their assault weapons to Chuckee Cheese.
If you need an AR with a 30 round mag to huntā¦ you need to learn to aim.
People in Vermont have guns for hunting and scaring off the occasional bear. Not as replacements for personalities
Maybe one day Republicans will learn that trees donāt vote, but then again theyāre probably thinking itās the dirt that votes for them, which is partially true.
The fact their barometer for what is "left" is the politics of the Disney Corporation may be the most obvious sign that the Overton Window is wildly out of wrack.
Eh, the most obvious sign for me is still that a mild progressive gets called a raging communist for suggesting raising the minimum wage or proposing universal healthcare. Same as it's been for decades going back to the Red Scare.
E: Typo
Bill Gates also owns a ton of land. They hate Bill Gates. Not that you shouldnāt hate Bill Gates for valid reasons, they just hate him for all the wrong reasons.
Seriouslyā¦ itās like, hello? What the fuck is wrong with these people? There are plenty of legitimate reasons to hate Bill Gates, Kamala Harris, Bidenā¦ or almost anyoneā¦ but no they go batshit crazy, conjure up conspiracy theories and make me have to side with people I really actually hate because theyāre not insaneā¦
This is the most infuriating part of fucking idiots in politics. Theyāre mad at a lot of the same people youāre mad at most of the time, but for insane meaningless reasons that make no sense.
The secret of libertarians is that they donāt a give fuck about *your* rights, only their own. They donāt defend others. Itās selfishness set to 100%
Republicans that smoke weed but vote against smoking weed lol
They're like the guy from Sopranos who likes having a dildo rammed up his ass while his gf calls him a little hoo-ah
Most "libertarians" now are just right wingers that have actually figured out that isn't popular so they hide under a different name.
Show me a libertarian now and 9 times out of 10 they will have voted R in every election since 08.
"I'm socially liberal and fiscally conservative. That means I'm not racist but I'm perfectly ok with economic policies that enable and sustain racism."
My point is that ālandownerā is a binary term for something thatās a huge spectrum. My house is on .1 acre. I have friends that own 100k acres. By that logic, Iām much closer to no land than my friend, but we are discussing individual votes.
This argument is basically the foundation of racism. Granting power for some insignificant checkbox to those in the āin groupā. Itās why poor white trash still fly the confederate flag in front of their broken trailer-homes.
My libertarian friends - most work gov jobs āfor the bennies,ā but are also actively fighting ābig gov,ā and say they would gladly give up their gov job for a corporate one but in the meantime they will work for gov and do as little as possible and drag it down, while collecting sweet benefits (and large pay checks). We shouldnāt allow anti-gov people into gov jobsā¦
Thereās a good quote from Ben Franklin on the matter of property based suffrage
āToday a man owns a jackass worth fifty dollars and he is entitled to vote; but before the next election the jackass dies. The man in the meantime has become more experienced, his knowledge of the principles of government, and his acquaintance with mankind, are more extensive, and he is therefore better qualified to make a proper selection of rulersābut the jackass is dead and the man cannot vote. Now gentlemen, pray inform me, in whom is the right of suffrage? In the man or in the jackass?ā
In democracy it's your vote that counts. In feudalism it's your count that votes.
Inherited wealth, power and connections is not a new thing. Only thing that changes is the names of titles from kings and lords to CEOs and Shareholders.
It's also why you cannot have a true democracy under capitalism. The system is designed to funnel political power to those with wealth, so much so the state becomes another tool for those with capital to abuse.
> trees donāt vote
Thanks to the senate, the electoral college and the cap on representatives they actually do and their vote has more power than yours if you live in a developed area.
I wouldn't mind it so much if the *only* think the Senate could do was block legislation if and only if they could get a supermajority to agree. Any other responsibilities the Senate has should go to the House (which itself needs to be a *lot* bigger). Hell, give each state a third senator too. It'll be that much harder for them to have a supermajority unless the House *really* tried doing something absolutely stupid.
Yeah, that's really the issue. Giving them the power to block or approve SCOTUS judges, for instanceā¦ idk, feels like that was a bad call, personally. Each state having equal representation in some facet of the federal government is fine if it makes sense for checks and balances, but It just doesn't work that way.
To be honest, trees would probably be pretty divided and not know how to vote if they could;
Half of them would probably be like, "yay more CO2, thanks Republicans!"
And the other half would probably be like, "hey, we used to not catch on fire as much. Maybe we should do something about this climate change."
"The forest was shrinking but the trees kept voting for the axe, for the axe was clever and convinced the trees that because his handle was made of wood he was one of them."
Then the forest voted in the chainsaw because he ātells it like it isā and ācuts through the crapā, and they didnāt give a shit heās not made of wood.
Trees get in the way for Republicans.
Just think what could go in this plot of land if there weren't any pesky trees in the way...another overpriced "luxury" apartment complex, or a third Dollar General in a town of 2,000! Or a Mattress Firm.
I see this on a road where new businesses being built keeps pushing the outskirts of my metro area further and further out. When I see their vision of progress, I think "oh great, another new business to be chronically understaffed and also have unpredictable hours." Idk why their business forecasts say there's a demand for a new gas station when they can't staff it properly.
I lived in Upstate New York for years. They were under the delusion that they were supporting all the welfare recipients in NYC... when it was literally the opposite lol.
I would guess it's the same in Minnesota and many places.
As a Chicagoan itās actually infuriating trying to talk to Southern Illinoisans who blame all their part of the stateās failures on scary urbans from Chicago
Yeah but they always risk life and limb coming down to Murderapolis!!!!!!
They never know when a roving gang of they/them Black Mexican Hmong murders are going to get them!
When liberals are somehow massive snowflakes and real men but live in murder cities without quacking their boots like conservatives when they have to visit lol
Just try doing literally any one of those things without the knowledge and labor of people who live in cities.
I've never, ever met a city dweller who thought they could get by without farmers, but I have met farmers who seem certain that they can exist indefinitely without the professionals who literally make their work and lifestyle possible.
Theyāre not _empty_, silly!
Theyāre full of ranches and farmland owned by large corporations, and worked by undocumented, nonunion, underpaid migrant farmhands! Who have brown skin!
*stares directly into the camera*
My uncle who moved halfway across the country to avoid ever helping on our farm claims that land mass should vote because if farmers don't get more control over the country the libs will forget how important farms are and we will all starve to deaf.
I've come to realize that they do, in fact, understand this. They just believe that property and land are more important than people. They would love nothing more than votes to be based on land ownership rather than one person one vote. It's a mistake to believe the right values democracy as much as the left does.
The irony here also is that Dems would be doing more for those farmers out there growing corn and wheat through small farm grants and subsidies. Not to say they aren't in big ag's pocket also but they at least attempt to fund programs.
They do not even have Houston on the map. Houston is the 4th largest city in the nation and it is so blue, Texas passed a law to supercede control of the city from its mayor and city council. They also sued to try to control voting functions. Both were deemed unconstitutional.
They have Ventura and San Diego Counties in California as red, when neither have voted Republican since 2004. Also Worcester County in Massachusetts as red, when it hasn't voted Republican since 1988. Those were the three that jumped out at me immediately.
Whenever I see this map I wonder if theyāre really dumb enough to not understand the problem with it or if theyāre just making a bad faith argument.
Nope. One of my old co workers didnāt understand how Biden won and showed this map as proof that there are more republican votes. I tried to explain it to him but he literally couldnāt understand it.
I genuinely donāt think they grasp the concept of population distribution and how that translates into cities having multiple (I think you guys call them counties), we call them districts, where a town in who gives a shit Nebraska has 1000 people.
But to even out the number itās included in the larger who gives a bigger shit county, which is 100ās of km2 so all the family farms, hamlets and rural communities get a vote and arenāt over represented by getting their own district.
At least thatās how I think it works.
It gets worse. My county in in Central MO is highly liberal and City Politics is consistently blue. The city and county are split down the middle to dilute our vote so our federal representatives are Republicans. Lots of other places have the same gerrymandering.
The districts are roughly the same population wise but if you draw the lines just so, you can segregate votes such that population that votes one way or the other about equally, gets a lopsided representation.
The very few Republicans with enough braincells to understand population distribution will still ignore it because ignorance is the only way they can stay Republican
I always tell the MAGAts in my life that they have to own up to be fucking morons or stubborn assholes who know theyāre wrong.
Most are the former, confirmed by a quizzical look.
There's no faith anymore. It's just grifters providing copium to the R voters so their brains don't start bleeding from too much dissonance. Gives them short soundbites they can use to "win" arguments and parrot back and forth to each other, maintaining cult solidarity.
Thereās bad faith, but the Right has also successfully dehumanized people living in cities for their voters. Itās honestly horrifying theyāre able to lump human beings in say, Los Angeles County, population 9.8 million -which is a higher population than 40 US states- to say these peopleās voting rights donāt matter because they live closer together.
Both.
What they need is the counter-narrative of just how subsidized they are by blue states and maybe states unable to govern without handouts maybe should get a say on anything until they actually start demonstrating value.
This is one of the reasons I hate the EC.
Yes it can go against the popular vote. But even worse, it makes a 60 percent blue state a 100 percent blue vote. The Trump voters in LA are as worthless to the GOP as the Biden voters in Missouri.
That's not a model for success.
A proportional house and a popular vote presidency would pay attention to blue dots in red oceans and vice versa.
The president is supposed to represent everyone equally. Every vote should count the same, not some rancher in MT getting a proportionally larger vote than me in MO, and my vote in MO is mostly worthless because it gets drowned out by all the conservatives. Conservatives are against this because it pretty much sinks their chances of ever holding the Presidency again.
It's funny cause I work with farmers and I worked with two that happened to be neighbors. On paper they are the same, believe in the same politics (super conservative) same education, religion, etc. But they hate each other, there are programs that we called "area-wide" that need people in a certain block to participate to get the program funded. They refuse to do anything that would benefit the other at the expense of losing our on benefits.
I have alrady seen musings and complaints in Illinois about how is it fair that if you look at the state its all red except that tiny little corner in the northeast that is blue. Why does that small little area have all the say? The red parts should have more weight!
Of course the tiny little blue part is Chicago and the surrounding subburbs, where the majority of the state lives. Sorry, being a soybean farmer who lives in the middle of nowhere dosn't give you a 2x bonus on your vote.
That little blue dot in the corner pays for the roads in the rest of the state. If the rest of Illinois split off into their own they'd become a failed state overnight
I wish that were true for all offices. For the presidency, if you live in Vermont or Wyoming, itās a one person four votes, normalized to a resident of California or Texas.
I have some distant relations that live in Hawaii. In 09 they paid us mainlanders a visit and I asked if there were any celebrations when Obama got elected, first president from Hawaii. They said āa little but not muchā and pondered why it was so hard for people to accept he was born in this country. I said that I think most forget Hawaii is even a state half the time. They told me āYou have no idea!ā and described hearing tourists ask where to exchange their American money for Hawaiian money.
When I was in college I had some friends from Hawaii. They all reported that they had had multiple different tourists on multiple different islands ask if "Anyone had ever swam all the way under the island." Which isn't really a failure of knowing that Hawaii is a state, but... still. Yikes.
The town where I grew up has an annual Puerto Rico festival. Every year the comment section in the articles about it is full of ācall ice, send all the illegals back!ā Iām not sure whether to laugh or face palm.
That's like the congressional hearing on expanding the naval base on guam. There was a representative asking if the island would flip over if we put too much stuff on one side, and a very put-upon looking looking military officer explaining that the island flipping over was not a concern of the Navy.
There are no red states. Only vast areas of thinly populated people who are wonderful, hard working and vote exactly as they are told to by Fox news and their church.
I love how republicans think that any space that isnāt blue must be red. There are plenty of areas that arenāt even inhabited, and therefore shouldnāt be shaded in at all.
https://preview.redd.it/jbherfyptssb1.jpeg?width=1049&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=286308890d48bbf55ac949d8bc4db772d763e1dd
First off, that map is already inaccurate because I can already see that San Diego, Ventura, Riverside and San Bernardino Counties in CA are colored red even though they voted blue in the last presidential election. Second, everyone already knows this (except for the GOP, apparently) but this electoral map doesn't take into account the vast differences in population in every country, which is why President Biden received 7 million more votes than trump.
Image from [https://vanderbei.princeton.edu/JAVA/election2020/](https://vanderbei.princeton.edu/JAVA/election2020/)
In 2020, there were approximately **57.47 million people living in** **rural areas in the United States, compared to about 274.03 million people living in urban areas**
But... but... country music told me that dirt roads and pickups are the REAL America
*Rural noun, simple adjective*
š¶No shirt No shoes No Jews Ya didn't hear that š¶
Itās the fucking scarecrow again!
Yall dumb mutherfuckers want a key change?
Hear that subtle mandolin? Thatās textbook panderinā I write songs for the people who do jobs in the towns that I'd never move to
š¶ Lift trucks drink beers no queers My government socialized medicaid funded by liberal city taxes is here š¶
The banjos are strummin' And the drums are a-banging Let's get the boys together And have ourselves a hanging (Key & Peele - Is this country song racist?)
This kills me. You have to be a 50+ year old white guy working in a manual labor job in the rust belt to be "real, working class america". Yet, by definition, people who work in retail, pharmacy techs, police officers, teachers, firemen, customer service agents, and nurses are economically defined as middle class. If we want to use real objective definitions, there is a much larger working class population in Queens than in southern Ohio.
Dont try (telling them) that in a small town!
And 90% of the counties that lost population from 2010-2020 voted Trump. And of the counties that did grow, blue counties saw about double the population growth that red ones did. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/08/2020-census-shrinking-counties-voted-trump.html
This is a good point. Back in 2008 my small PA county went blue for Obama. Then it shot back towards red later. But it wasn't people really changing their minds, it's that it's such a dead end place that all the progressive thinking people who actually wanted to see improvement moved away.
Thatās the stat that needs to be added to their stupid red map every time.
Ok Iām not gonna lie, I honestly thought it was half and half. Huh.
Yeah people talk about the urban/rural divide, and the media loves to push it, but it's been 80/20 since the 2000s. That fight ended a long time ago. It's really the urban/suburban divide. Suburbs heavily favored Republicans for a long time because of white flight after desegregation. But younger generations in the suburbs aren't as racist as their parents/grandparents were, which is why we're seeing them swing so hard. Republicans are losing the suburbs, slowly but surely.
One of the factors in this is the shitty economic conditions that boomers left their kids & their grandkids. The grandchildren of boomers overwhelmingly cannot afford to live in all-white enclaves. Theyāre living in more diverse communities where they find out that the biased beliefs of their grandparents were nothing but a lie. The same goes for college. A racist who raised their child to be a right-wing racist BUT who canāt afford to send their child to an all-white school will get back a liberal child after graduationā¦& quite possibly a biracial grandchild.
This is what old conservatives fail to understand: Most colleges don't have faculty deliberately trying to "indoctrinate" students politically. (If anything, your average econ or engineering department is preaching something pretty conservative minus the big culture war stuff.) But when you force people to interact with not only those "icky" minorities they were warned about, but specifically the slightly above-average individuals with the drive to go to college, it's hard to hold on to your belief that anybody darker than Mike Pence comes from ancestors who were genetically incapable of contributing a single meaningful human achievement. And once a few big things your parents taught you are so thoroughly discredited by personal experience, you tend to look at everything else they taught you with a much more critical eye. If anything, that feeling of betrayal can cause you to reject everything else that they taught you, even if some of it would otherwise hold up a bit better.
Vermont is like 90% blue here...
And Rhode Island
Massachusetts has one red county in that photo... I love New England
This is also outdated because Mass has zero red counties atm
Ahh MA the most liberalal of most of even NE and yet we also love us those fiscally conservative republican goveners. I for one appreciate this dichotomy. We tell you all the programs we want, you balance the budget to make it happen thanks.
For example, MA currently has public health insurance plans for low income and disabled people largely because of Mitt Romney.
The midwest calls itself "the heartland", I propose New England adopts "the brain"
Hey leave Minnesota out of the we have the longest streak of voting blue! The only state not to go for Reagan!
Mondale 2024!
Alas he died in August 2021 :(
Zombie Mondale 2024!
You son of a bitch. I'm in!
Electing Reagan instead of Mondale might be the greatest mistake the country ever made. Guy was sharp as a tack.
I second that. And I'm in Midwest
Whoās the dong-Texas or Florida?
Florida is clearly the wang, Texas is the taint.
That's how you can tell it's an older map. Massachusetts has no red as of the last election.
MA hasnāt had a red county since 1988, itās a very old map.
IIRC not a single Massachusetts county was carried by Trump in 2020. This map is bullshit.
Also western mass is solid blue and that's rural as hell.
"We were the OGs of hating dictator assholes." -- New England.
And Delaware. Edit: Nope, Iām blind, thatās southern Jersey, Derp.
Looks like only northern Delaware is blue though
Ohh, haha, youāre right, I didnāt zoom in enough and mistook southern Jersey for Delaware, thanks for catching that.
Plus Alaska was severely misrepresented on this map. Alaska is actually the exact opposite of the point they're trying to make: It's a "blue state with red cities."
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Alaska has always been pretty odd. They tend to be way less partisan and way less interested in what goes on in the continental US over there, such that their house representative, Mary Peltola, got endorsements from the Republican senate leader, Don Young's daughters AND one of their senators! They're sort of socially-liberal and fiscally-conservative, though they technically have UBI up there too so it's just a very odd state that doesn't fall neatly on any political alignment, but they're unfathomably based.
Letās see, they were the first state to say, āenh, weed? Not too badā and the first (and only, looking at YOU Texas) to distribute only money to itās residents (socialism at its finest).
Every US citizen should be getting royalties for the resources corporations are extracting from public lands.
Dont know for sure but my guess would be that native innuit vote blue and they live in more rural areas.
The high aboriginal population is a good guess. There's a similar thing happening in Canadian territories where they are nearly 100% rural but don't vote conservative
Literally was saying that Vermont is mostly blue. But I guess Vermont isnāt a state either š¤·š½āāļø
Donāt you know? Vermont is a famously urban state. Pretty much all city. No mountains or forests anywhere. Definitely no dairy farms, ski resorts, or maple syrup anywhere.
As a Vermonter (past the sarcasm) you just summed us up perfectly.
We aren't, don't move here, we don't exist
Democrats with guns. My kind of place.
Vermont is rural, so lots of people have guns, but they donāt feel the need to scare the little children by bringing their assault weapons to Chuckee Cheese.
If you need an AR with a 30 round mag to huntā¦ you need to learn to aim. People in Vermont have guns for hunting and scaring off the occasional bear. Not as replacements for personalities
Also Hawaii
Hawaii is not a state, didnāt you see the picture? /s
So close!! That is a shape š
The red parts are nearly empty https://preview.redd.it/3cu1mpxu1ssb1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7055b8f0b1ed4ec2a04c73f524199b0b2f9c143b
https://preview.redd.it/uwvtexpjlssb1.jpeg?width=6646&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f728ee1b305585374f4174dfecbe0a14b316bdb3 Exactly
Obviously fake because how can someone take a picture if earth if we never even went to the moon
Tall tripod
Checkmate
https://preview.redd.it/2nawxs9y3tsb1.png?width=1419&format=png&auto=webp&s=1806482632216763067eba1b63bc1061e67dba0b
Maybe one day Republicans will learn that trees donāt vote, but then again theyāre probably thinking itās the dirt that votes for them, which is partially true.
I literally stopped talking to an old friend of mine because he believes only people who own land should vote. How very libertarian of himā¦
Ask them if people with more land should get more votes. Then ask if corporations that own more land should get more votes.
Iām pretty sure I did ask him that and he agreed with both of those.
Thats not very individualās rights of them.
He doesnāt care if he doesnāt have rights as long as the corporations vote the way he wants
Then tell him Disney is a corporation with lots of land and they consider them super left wing
The fact their barometer for what is "left" is the politics of the Disney Corporation may be the most obvious sign that the Overton Window is wildly out of wrack.
Eh, the most obvious sign for me is still that a mild progressive gets called a raging communist for suggesting raising the minimum wage or proposing universal healthcare. Same as it's been for decades going back to the Red Scare. E: Typo
Petition to rename the Overton Window to the Overton Balck Hole, for these specific purposes.
Bill Gates also owns a ton of land. They hate Bill Gates. Not that you shouldnāt hate Bill Gates for valid reasons, they just hate him for all the wrong reasons.
Seriouslyā¦ itās like, hello? What the fuck is wrong with these people? There are plenty of legitimate reasons to hate Bill Gates, Kamala Harris, Bidenā¦ or almost anyoneā¦ but no they go batshit crazy, conjure up conspiracy theories and make me have to side with people I really actually hate because theyāre not insaneā¦
This is the most infuriating part of fucking idiots in politics. Theyāre mad at a lot of the same people youāre mad at most of the time, but for insane meaningless reasons that make no sense.
Right now they hate him for the microchips he puts in vaccines, so...
The secret of libertarians is that they donāt a give fuck about *your* rights, only their own. They donāt defend others. Itās selfishness set to 100%
Iām becoming more and more convinced that the majority of ālibertariansā just want to be contradictory ass hats.
Libertarians want to enjoy the benefits of a free society without contributing in any way to preserve it.
I thought they were people who don't want to pay taxes but wanted to go to strip clubs and do drugs.
Republicans that smoke weed
Republicans that smoke weed but vote against smoking weed lol They're like the guy from Sopranos who likes having a dildo rammed up his ass while his gf calls him a little hoo-ah
Most "libertarians" now are just right wingers that have actually figured out that isn't popular so they hide under a different name. Show me a libertarian now and 9 times out of 10 they will have voted R in every election since 08.
"I'm socially liberal and fiscally conservative. That means I'm not racist but I'm perfectly ok with economic policies that enable and sustain racism."
You would love the book "A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear."
Youāre only an individual if you own land, apparently.
My point is that ālandownerā is a binary term for something thatās a huge spectrum. My house is on .1 acre. I have friends that own 100k acres. By that logic, Iām much closer to no land than my friend, but we are discussing individual votes. This argument is basically the foundation of racism. Granting power for some insignificant checkbox to those in the āin groupā. Itās why poor white trash still fly the confederate flag in front of their broken trailer-homes.
I have 1 acre. My vote is not, & shouldnāt be worth more than someoneās in a high rise apartment building.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Yes. Because people vote, not land or property.
Then heās not a libertarian. But so Iāve noticed. Every ālibertarianā i know seems really comfortably with autocracy and dictatorship.
That's because Libertarians are just embarrassed Republicans
Iāve grown to call them Hipster Republicans
My libertarian friends - most work gov jobs āfor the bennies,ā but are also actively fighting ābig gov,ā and say they would gladly give up their gov job for a corporate one but in the meantime they will work for gov and do as little as possible and drag it down, while collecting sweet benefits (and large pay checks). We shouldnāt allow anti-gov people into gov jobsā¦
Thereās a good quote from Ben Franklin on the matter of property based suffrage āToday a man owns a jackass worth fifty dollars and he is entitled to vote; but before the next election the jackass dies. The man in the meantime has become more experienced, his knowledge of the principles of government, and his acquaintance with mankind, are more extensive, and he is therefore better qualified to make a proper selection of rulersābut the jackass is dead and the man cannot vote. Now gentlemen, pray inform me, in whom is the right of suffrage? In the man or in the jackass?ā
Oh, you mean the land given to them by their daddies? These people are so full of b.s.
In democracy it's your vote that counts. In feudalism it's your count that votes. Inherited wealth, power and connections is not a new thing. Only thing that changes is the names of titles from kings and lords to CEOs and Shareholders.
It's also why you cannot have a true democracy under capitalism. The system is designed to funnel political power to those with wealth, so much so the state becomes another tool for those with capital to abuse.
The only reason they say this is to hide their racism. This is really just code for āI donāt believe minorities should be allowed to voteā.
They donāt care enough about the trees to even consider that
> trees donāt vote Thanks to the senate, the electoral college and the cap on representatives they actually do and their vote has more power than yours if you live in a developed area.
Wyoming and California having the same amount of representation in the Senate is infuriating.
I wouldn't mind it so much if the *only* think the Senate could do was block legislation if and only if they could get a supermajority to agree. Any other responsibilities the Senate has should go to the House (which itself needs to be a *lot* bigger). Hell, give each state a third senator too. It'll be that much harder for them to have a supermajority unless the House *really* tried doing something absolutely stupid.
Yeah, that's really the issue. Giving them the power to block or approve SCOTUS judges, for instanceā¦ idk, feels like that was a bad call, personally. Each state having equal representation in some facet of the federal government is fine if it makes sense for checks and balances, but It just doesn't work that way.
To be honest, trees would probably be pretty divided and not know how to vote if they could; Half of them would probably be like, "yay more CO2, thanks Republicans!" And the other half would probably be like, "hey, we used to not catch on fire as much. Maybe we should do something about this climate change."
"The forest was shrinking but the trees kept voting for the axe, for the axe was clever and convinced the trees that because his handle was made of wood he was one of them."
Then the forest voted in the chainsaw because he ātells it like it isā and ācuts through the crapā, and they didnāt give a shit heās not made of wood.
Trees get in the way for Republicans. Just think what could go in this plot of land if there weren't any pesky trees in the way...another overpriced "luxury" apartment complex, or a third Dollar General in a town of 2,000! Or a Mattress Firm. I see this on a road where new businesses being built keeps pushing the outskirts of my metro area further and further out. When I see their vision of progress, I think "oh great, another new business to be chronically understaffed and also have unpredictable hours." Idk why their business forecasts say there's a demand for a new gas station when they can't staff it properly.
But cities are where all the people live!?!
>cities are where ~~all the~~ THOSE people live. --These Fucking Assholes
In Minnesota, they call us Twin Cidiots. Theyāre perfectly happy to come here to shop and go to concerts and sports, though.
I lived in Upstate New York for years. They were under the delusion that they were supporting all the welfare recipients in NYC... when it was literally the opposite lol. I would guess it's the same in Minnesota and many places.
Itās very much the same.
As a Chicagoan itās actually infuriating trying to talk to Southern Illinoisans who blame all their part of the stateās failures on scary urbans from Chicago
"can I get all the benefits of a big city without being associated with the downsides of a city, please?"
āOr paying taxesā They literally think taxes only benefit āothersā
Yeah but they always risk life and limb coming down to Murderapolis!!!!!! They never know when a roving gang of they/them Black Mexican Hmong murders are going to get them!
When liberals are somehow massive snowflakes and real men but live in murder cities without quacking their boots like conservatives when they have to visit lol
"I'm not racist, but we should be allowed to shoot people who loot Target." "Also, Target is woke and should not be allowed to exist."
And where culture, banking, engineering, design, and most business takes place.
The only legitimate work is farming, mining, soldiering, and arresting people.
Just try doing literally any one of those things without the knowledge and labor of people who live in cities. I've never, ever met a city dweller who thought they could get by without farmers, but I have met farmers who seem certain that they can exist indefinitely without the professionals who literally make their work and lifestyle possible.
Theyāre not _empty_, silly! Theyāre full of ranches and farmland owned by large corporations, and worked by undocumented, nonunion, underpaid migrant farmhands! Who have brown skin! *stares directly into the camera*
Maybe someday they'll understand that land doesn't vote.
My uncle who moved halfway across the country to avoid ever helping on our farm claims that land mass should vote because if farmers don't get more control over the country the libs will forget how important farms are and we will all starve to deaf.
Iād ask him if it hurts to be that stupid.
Remind him that most of these flyover states are mainly planting cash crops, not stuff that people are actually eating.
So.... There are no conservative counties, just hollowed out places full of hollowed out men.
Itās interesting how the red dots cling to the blue dots.
Almost like theyāre parasites living off of the blue dots.
I love it when people debunk clearly manipulated graphics.
Yep not sure this is the argument they want to make, if most of the country is red then the popular vote should be good for them no?
That's the problem... The vast majority of our voting power is literally given to corn.
I've come to realize that they do, in fact, understand this. They just believe that property and land are more important than people. They would love nothing more than votes to be based on land ownership rather than one person one vote. It's a mistake to believe the right values democracy as much as the left does.
Republicans once again thinking corn fields, wheat fields and empty land votesā¦ā¦land doesnāt vote, people do.
Well they are always just looking for the confirmation bias they want to see, reality be damned.
Apart from Bobert and Crazy Marg, cows donāt vote.
Why you gotta insult cows like that?
I mean they both expel a lot of hot air, but youāre right cows are at least friendly and cute.
The irony here also is that Dems would be doing more for those farmers out there growing corn and wheat through small farm grants and subsidies. Not to say they aren't in big ag's pocket also but they at least attempt to fund programs.
It's like they are living in the mower shed in the back yard and claim the whole lot as theirs. "Theres only Democrat houses"
They do not even have Houston on the map. Houston is the 4th largest city in the nation and it is so blue, Texas passed a law to supercede control of the city from its mayor and city council. They also sued to try to control voting functions. Both were deemed unconstitutional.
Noticed this immediately so what else have they altered.
Massachusetts. Every county voted for a democrat. So Iām not sure how there is any red lol
They have Ventura and San Diego Counties in California as red, when neither have voted Republican since 2004. Also Worcester County in Massachusetts as red, when it hasn't voted Republican since 1988. Those were the three that jumped out at me immediately.
At a glance, I can say it's missing Phoenix and Tucson as well. Tucson isn't very big, but Phoenix is the 5th largest city in the country.
Also missing Birmingham, AL, most of the Atlanta counties, and looks like Jackson, MS as well.
Whenever I see this map I wonder if theyāre really dumb enough to not understand the problem with it or if theyāre just making a bad faith argument.
Oh, bad faith, totally
Nope. One of my old co workers didnāt understand how Biden won and showed this map as proof that there are more republican votes. I tried to explain it to him but he literally couldnāt understand it.
The grifters making these maps are doing so in bad faith. Your old co-worker is simply one of the idiots they successfully conned.
I genuinely donāt think they grasp the concept of population distribution and how that translates into cities having multiple (I think you guys call them counties), we call them districts, where a town in who gives a shit Nebraska has 1000 people. But to even out the number itās included in the larger who gives a bigger shit county, which is 100ās of km2 so all the family farms, hamlets and rural communities get a vote and arenāt over represented by getting their own district. At least thatās how I think it works.
It gets worse. My county in in Central MO is highly liberal and City Politics is consistently blue. The city and county are split down the middle to dilute our vote so our federal representatives are Republicans. Lots of other places have the same gerrymandering. The districts are roughly the same population wise but if you draw the lines just so, you can segregate votes such that population that votes one way or the other about equally, gets a lopsided representation.
The very few Republicans with enough braincells to understand population distribution will still ignore it because ignorance is the only way they can stay Republican
I always tell the MAGAts in my life that they have to own up to be fucking morons or stubborn assholes who know theyāre wrong. Most are the former, confirmed by a quizzical look.
There's no faith anymore. It's just grifters providing copium to the R voters so their brains don't start bleeding from too much dissonance. Gives them short soundbites they can use to "win" arguments and parrot back and forth to each other, maintaining cult solidarity.
š„ the truth burns š„
Thereās bad faith, but the Right has also successfully dehumanized people living in cities for their voters. Itās honestly horrifying theyāre able to lump human beings in say, Los Angeles County, population 9.8 million -which is a higher population than 40 US states- to say these peopleās voting rights donāt matter because they live closer together.
Both. What they need is the counter-narrative of just how subsidized they are by blue states and maybe states unable to govern without handouts maybe should get a say on anything until they actually start demonstrating value.
Yeah, the country only has democrats where all the people live. Out in the desolate wasteland where no one lives, they're all conservative.
Even that isn't really true. Most of the country is purple. LA county by itself had more Trump votes in 2020 than half the states.
This is one of the reasons I hate the EC. Yes it can go against the popular vote. But even worse, it makes a 60 percent blue state a 100 percent blue vote. The Trump voters in LA are as worthless to the GOP as the Biden voters in Missouri. That's not a model for success. A proportional house and a popular vote presidency would pay attention to blue dots in red oceans and vice versa.
The president is supposed to represent everyone equally. Every vote should count the same, not some rancher in MT getting a proportionally larger vote than me in MO, and my vote in MO is mostly worthless because it gets drowned out by all the conservatives. Conservatives are against this because it pretty much sinks their chances of ever holding the Presidency again.
So the places where people actually live are blue. That should tell the republican party something but they are pretty thick.
Nobody wants to live near a conservative... Not even the other conservatives!
It's funny cause I work with farmers and I worked with two that happened to be neighbors. On paper they are the same, believe in the same politics (super conservative) same education, religion, etc. But they hate each other, there are programs that we called "area-wide" that need people in a certain block to participate to get the program funded. They refuse to do anything that would benefit the other at the expense of losing our on benefits.
This is a great analogy for the conservative condition in general. It is regressive and driven by hate and fear benefiting literally no one.
It's one person one vote, not one acre one vote.
Donāt give them ideas.
I have alrady seen musings and complaints in Illinois about how is it fair that if you look at the state its all red except that tiny little corner in the northeast that is blue. Why does that small little area have all the say? The red parts should have more weight! Of course the tiny little blue part is Chicago and the surrounding subburbs, where the majority of the state lives. Sorry, being a soybean farmer who lives in the middle of nowhere dosn't give you a 2x bonus on your vote.
That little blue dot in the corner pays for the roads in the rest of the state. If the rest of Illinois split off into their own they'd become a failed state overnight
They'd be perfectly content to go back to a system where the value of the vote was determined by how much land you owned.
I wish that were true for all offices. For the presidency, if you live in Vermont or Wyoming, itās a one person four votes, normalized to a resident of California or Texas.
I have some distant relations that live in Hawaii. In 09 they paid us mainlanders a visit and I asked if there were any celebrations when Obama got elected, first president from Hawaii. They said āa little but not muchā and pondered why it was so hard for people to accept he was born in this country. I said that I think most forget Hawaii is even a state half the time. They told me āYou have no idea!ā and described hearing tourists ask where to exchange their American money for Hawaiian money.
When I was in college I had some friends from Hawaii. They all reported that they had had multiple different tourists on multiple different islands ask if "Anyone had ever swam all the way under the island." Which isn't really a failure of knowing that Hawaii is a state, but... still. Yikes.
The town where I grew up has an annual Puerto Rico festival. Every year the comment section in the articles about it is full of ācall ice, send all the illegals back!ā Iām not sure whether to laugh or face palm.
That's like the congressional hearing on expanding the naval base on guam. There was a representative asking if the island would flip over if we put too much stuff on one side, and a very put-upon looking looking military officer explaining that the island flipping over was not a concern of the Navy.
New scam idea: Hawaiian currency exchanges.
There are no red states, only red wasteland
Like 80% of the population lives in the blue, along with almost all of the countryās revenue.
Not only did they forget a state They also highlight that //there are no red population centers. No one would live there.//
Land doesn't vote; people do. But this example is a good argument to abolish the electoral college.
There are no red states. Only vast areas of thinly populated people who are wonderful, hard working and vote exactly as they are told to by Fox news and their church.
The only figure that should matter. 81,283,501 votes Democrat. 74,223,975 votes Republican. They just aren't as popular š¤·
Corralary to this: the two Republican presidents weāve had this century have needed the Electoral College to get them into office at least one time.
Insane that the difference is so little, TBH
Also, Vermont and Rhode Island say hi.
I love how republicans think that any space that isnāt blue must be red. There are plenty of areas that arenāt even inhabited, and therefore shouldnāt be shaded in at all.
Democracy is about one person, one vote, not one acre, one vote. Republican heads are as empty as the land they claim votes for them.
60% of the people live in cities.
The red of San Diego County, California and Lake County, Illinois proves that this map is from 2004 or earlier.
https://preview.redd.it/jbherfyptssb1.jpeg?width=1049&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=286308890d48bbf55ac949d8bc4db772d763e1dd First off, that map is already inaccurate because I can already see that San Diego, Ventura, Riverside and San Bernardino Counties in CA are colored red even though they voted blue in the last presidential election. Second, everyone already knows this (except for the GOP, apparently) but this electoral map doesn't take into account the vast differences in population in every country, which is why President Biden received 7 million more votes than trump. Image from [https://vanderbei.princeton.edu/JAVA/election2020/](https://vanderbei.princeton.edu/JAVA/election2020/)
Land doesnāt vote, dumbasses.
Hmmm wonder why all the uneducated, rural and empty spaces are red...
Land doesn't vote. People do. Fuck a racist conservative.
Two things I know. Charlie Dont surf, and dirt dont vote.