It’s pretty okay. Lots of engagement, also there’s something of a ‘block early and often’ culture that seems to have a way of really reducing the drama and nonsense

Yes, that was the wording then, it was the qualification to vote (male, citizen, over 21). Since the adoption of the 19th Amendment (which happened after, and supercedes this text) that standard has included women and today you just need to be a citizen and over 18. The proportionality of loss of EC votes and congressional seating (these are apportioned on the same basis, after all) was about states like South Carolina and Mississippi, whose population of enslaved people exceeded that of white citizens- if these states didn’t respect the new citizenship and voting rights of most of their citizens, they’d lose more than half of their federal representation, and that in turn would cost them and their confederates influence in the resulting federal government.

My prior comment, made in the context of a Kansas court declaring that voting is not a right according to the Kansas constitution, was intended to point out that if nobody has that right in Kansas, that may be well and fine in Kansas politics, but if Kansas conducts itself in that way it will cost them influence federally, and that sets the stage for another round of Voting Rights Acts that can be used to guarantee voting rights federally even if states don’t want to do it themselves.

The US Constitution, on the other hand, does not oblige the federal government to recognize the electoral votes or congressional delegates of a state that does not enfranchise its citizens and submit to their will in the form of their votes.

The Guarantee Clause (article 4, section 4) of the constitution requires that state governments take the form of a republic, versus that of a theocracy or monarchy or dictatorship. (All republics involve some degree of democracy). Section 2 of the 14th Amendment says that if states deny citizens the right to vote, those states shall lose their representation at the federal level- that is, if you’re not a democracy that submits to the will of its voters, you can do that but in the process your electoral college votes and ability to send congressmen to DC goes away- and your state will lose its ability to influence federal law and to elect federal officials.

Of course, the current SCOTUS is likely to find some way to assert that anything giving the GOP political advantage must be what the framers would have wanted no matter how many ways they told us unambiguously they fucking wanted government derived from the consent of the governed.

For your consideration, here is the text of section 2 of the 14th amendment:

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

A literal reading of this text, apart from the anachronism by which voters must be male and 21 (which should be overridden by the 19th amendment, which enfranchises women’s vote, and the fact that voting age today is 18) says that if your state doesn’t let its citizens vote and abide by the result, its electoral college votes won’t count either, and neither will its congressional delegation be seated.

Isn’t the requirement only that the government be “republican”? A republican government doesn’t necessarily have to be representative. It only needs to not be a monarchy.

That’s the requirement of the Guarantee Clause (article 4, section 4) of the constitution- in its time, it was about barring non-democracy states from statehood, it was a guarantee of protection of any state from foreign invasion, and protection of any state from internal coup or rebellion.

But, if you look at section 2 of the 14th Amendment, it’s a banger: if the right to vote is denied to citizens qualified to vote, the state doing it will lose its federal representation (as in, it will not just lose its electoral college votes in federal elections, its congressmen will not be seated). The purpose for this section of this amendment was to prevent confederate states from denying the formerly-enslaved the right to vote, and it should certainly apply today if Red-State legislators try to use their power to strip their citizens of their ability to meaningfully vote

While on the one hand I can agree there’s a place and time to be present and participate appropriately, on the other hand it’s so goddamned tiring to see politics that in situations of nuance zoom in on ‘control them’ as a thing everyone can rally to as if the solution of phone control was really going to be simple and accomplish its objectives.

I mean, criminalizing drugs seemed on its face to be a simple-enough thing to do, and a good idea- who could object to that, right? Who favors addiction, right? What could go wrong? Fundamentally, the ask for enough power to ban anything isn’t a trivial ask, and it shouldn’t be undertaken lightly.

Sorry- I didn’t know that part off the top of my head But since you asked, Russia’s presence in Hawaii was sort of like its presence in Alaska and California: early 1800s outposts established by agents acting on behalf of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian-American_Company, which the Russian Crown had granted a monopoly on operations in North America and the Pacific but was unable to back or support such claims.

You mean something like a third Reich?

Well, yeah. In very real ways WWII was about upending the post-WW1 order (which was punitive of Germany generally). It’s really interesting to understand how crazy the flows of money were, and how badly the US in particular bungled its role as the issuer of the world’s de facto reserve currency at the time- in the aftermath of WWI, Germany and its allies were made to pay reparations, France occupied the industrial territory on their border, and any money France or Belgium or Holland received in reparations promptly went to American banks, to repay war bonds borrowed to finance the fighting (which had, in turn, been spent in American factories on war materiel, weapons, munitions, etc).

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/12/the-real-story-of-how-america-became-an-economic-superpower/384034/ (sorry this is paywalled now, it was a really good read when it was available so I’ll summarize briefly)

By the end of the first world war, all of the belligerent nations’ economies were in tatters, their leadership were forced to inflate their currencies to make payments- but the US declined to inflate its own currency to make it workable for them- and when the US didn’t think about its new role in maintaining a viable world order, it put everyone that owed it anything in the position of paying their debts not in their own inflated currencies, but in US dollars. This essentially collapsed the German economy and its currency, and it was just unnecessary.

I wonder why we can’t just decode the term ‘settler’ for what it is:

“terrorist”, but with state aegis and pliant media cooking up anodyne narrative cover

Translation: “We can’t have it how I want it because you fucking people don’t want that”

All of these locations (Alaska, California, Hawaii, much of eastern Europe) are ones that Russia has at one point in its imperial or soviet history had either outposts or territorial claim to. Of course, much of Eastern Europe was as recently as the 1980s under the Kremlin’s direct control, either as puppet states or as territory Russia or the USSR directly claimed. Finland and Poland in particular have both been completely invaded by Russian forces multiple times, but at the moment they are built up defensively in ways that Russia quite honestly has zero chances of winning against.

Alaska was territory that imperial Russia claimed before any European country did. It was sold to the US during the Crimean war (1853) because Russia needed the money and in all likelihood it was going to lose it to Britain. Russia established early trading outposts in Alaska and California but sold or abandoned them after wiping out the fur animals they’d come to harvest and trade.

This talk for the benefit of Russian audiences is about reminding Russians of former imperial or soviet glory, but the problem with that historically is that it wasn’t actually glorious.

The current propaganda push to get Russians thinking they really have a shot at rolling back the map changes since Imperial times is just an effort to sustain Russia’s modern project: dismantling the post-WWII order in which the West (the US, in particular, but NATO and much of the UN) upholds alliances that Putin sees as against Russia’s interests.

I’m pretty sure California could defeat Russia

California has more blue-water navy in San Diego than Russia has in the world. It also has more air force stationed there than Russia has.

(granted, these are US forces, not California forces, but there is no real-world scenario right now in which California would face invasion without the full military support of United States and NATO)

Where is Russia 2 miles from Alaska?

The international border goes between the islands of little and big Diomede. Both of these islands are remote from land in either direction, and they are situated about midway in the narrowest part of the Bering Strait.

Since you asked where, here it is on a map

Yep, that’s pretty close, but nope, that’s not really tactically meaningful.

Yeah and it’s also accusing libraries of being drug-infested sex dens

It’s as if Fox News is not a reasonable source for anything but counterfactual nonsense

So if I’m mathing correctly, logic dictates that we break them both

Oh but it’s super-entertaining to punch up to boomers

Has finance guru Dave Ramsey looked at the cost of housing compared to what working people earn? It’s very different now than it was when the boomers were able to buy houses on the income of a single entry-level wage earner per household.

One wonders whether ‘finance gurus’ aren’t just out-of-touch boomers any more

When you have financial engineers overriding the decisions of mechanical engineers, you get crashy airplanes and eventually, caught up murdering people that might talk to investigators in order to defend those juicy profits

…sort of like how when administrators and insurance folk and lawyers and judges override the decisions of doctors and nurses, you end up with highly profitable hospitals and people dying for it

…all a bit like when the bean counters run your software company, layoffs designed to boost stock price by showing investors ‘fiscal discipline’ leaves your engineering teams shorthanded and forces them to de-prioritize bug fixes and dealing with technical debt and rigorous testing and you end up shipping lots of bugs when you release your product

There’s a couple of things at play here:

Where the infra (say it’s the road) isn’t adequately engineered to accommodate cycling and driving at the same time, it’s going to give drivers the experience that the road is a scarce resource and when resources are scarce, some folks are going to think in eliminationist terms (e.g. if those people just didn’t exist, everything would be fine) or the part of their brains that descends from people that wiped out competing clans and took their resources rules the moment and they set about violently defending ‘their’ resources.

The folks most-triggered at being made to share the road with cyclists really do some mental gymnastics to frame it in a way that they’re really the victims here and it’s cyclists, not the road engineering, that are the problem. Oh, poor me those cyclists don’t pay taxes and I subsidize their use of my roads bla bla bla and eventually that comes out in the form of vehicular assault to teach cyclists a lesson to stay off their roads. It’s bullshit all the way down of course, but that way they get to feel like the good guys while still bullying and murdering cyclists.

Also, it’s not by accident that the ‘everything is woke’ people are the first to engage in whatever moral panic that’s directing political violence at today’s boogeyman- whether it’s trans people in bathrooms, or gay people generally, or pregnant women that have ideas about bodily autonomy, their targets are always a tiny vulnerable demographic and uniting to put them in their place is an exercise in maintaining or restoring what they think order ought to look like. If they’re not putting people into the bottom rung of whatever hierarchy they think they’re defending, probably they think it’s the end of order or civilization or the like and they’ve failed in their duties to uphold order. Keeping them agitated about (and acting out about) moral panics is an effective way for lobby groups to pit people against scapegoats to keep their ire focused away from themselves or their patrons.

“total victory” sure sounds like they’ve given some thought to their objectives and it’s no accident they’re killing lots of civilians