@unabomber@brad Are you ready for the realization that your vote doesn’t matter? Who would you vote for that would do anything different anyway? The Indian who’ll drop all the semi-cool stuff the moment he gets into office (a repeat of Trump)? The Indian who’s a Zionist shill? (trick question: all candidates of both parties are Zionist shills) Maybe Zion Ron or Zion Don are more your boat? Perhaps neocons like Chris Christie?
What’re you upset about?
Let me know when any of this will actually matter. It won’t.
The outcome of an election is not determined by those who vote, but by those who don’t vote. Since 1945 or so, we have had pretty close elections, with not much more than half of the people voting. In the 1968 election about 80 million voted, and about 50 million qualified to vote did not. The outcome was determined by the 50 million who didn’t vote. If you could have got 2 percent of the nonvoters to the polls to vote for your candidate, you could have elected him. And that has been true of most of our recent elections. It’s the ones who don’t vote who determine the outcome.
@ThatWouldBeTelling@meowski@brad@chillpilled@lichelordgodfrey@unabomber > Xi would like to use nukes to defeat and later occupy the US. Why would he do that? Nuclear weapons functionally do not exist, in the sense that no sane nation would bother using them for a place which they plan to occupy. Nukes are very real, and very unlikely to be used by anyone for actual military purposes. Granted hydrogen bombs are substantially more damaging with far less fallout for the area, but that still doesn't make sense. We're China's biggest customer and they want our food; no sense nuking us. They also hold a substantial amount of treasuries. Same reason they wouldn't want to disrupt us. Much better to parasitize us than maim or end.
Locally, because of federalism all the other issues are still relevant, and if you’re in a good enough place, yes, voting makes a big difference.
As I keep saying, here in my corner of deep Red state flyover country we’ve got a corrupt ruling class, especially at the city level, yet we keep sending the worst actors back home to spend more time with their families and after 1-2 betrayals on new taxes have totally refused to play ball.
“opt-out communities” is I think a non-starter in the US simply because the Left won’t leave us alone, it’s not in their nature going back to founding of the modern Left in the French Revolution, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_the_Vend%C3%A9e
Since elections are not honest, why bother about law, law makers, law enforcement, infrastructure, defense etc. Is it possible to just avoid all of this and the consequences of these and just disregard their presence? I am sure within our opt-out communities these same structures like law, law makers, law enforcement, infrastructure and defense will form again, and perhaps we can have a say in those new structures?
Alternate viewpoint from someone that started paying attention in '88: It's Bush, all the way down.
Prescott Bush was one of the assets named by Smedley Butler in the plot to overthrow Rooseveldt, who we can presume was duly-elected. Prescott's son George just happened to start a CIA-front (Zapata Oil) with an "ex-CIA" agent immediately after graduation.
Kennedy's election was rigged. Nixon (a CIA bagman) was projected to win, Hillary-style. The "TV is what ruined Nixon" debate excuse is an after-thought/retcon to explain things. Kennedy was installed, and was a military asset. The establishment of The U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School (SWCS) was directly to combat the threat Bush's CIA was posing to the future.
Nixon's election was rigged. This was one of the things E. Howard Hunt was screaming during his time in jail before Nixon released him (this is before Watergate/Plumbers). Nixon didn't play ball, and was replaced by Ford. I would argue there is sufficient evidence that Bush himself (who was silently running the CIA at that time) was responsible for installing Ford as VP in the first place, and ensuring he cooperated like Lyndon Johnson did.
Reagan was an installed military asset, which prompted Bush to come out of the shadows in '84 to take the reigns, all while planning Continuity of Government. Major economic improvements of the first term were clearly not wanted. Reagan's assassination attempt was Bush's power projection, and it worked. Bush ran the government, and everyone bought the TV narrative that Reagan was old and senile. Reagan's transition letter to Bush, with the above in mind, is very interesting.
Without question, every political candidate presented by either major party, with the exceptions of Ross Perot, Ron Paul, and Donald Trump, were selected by Bush and allowed to run since. Bush as a candidate was widely-disliked by the public, so naturally, after their frontrunner, Gary Hart, just happened to have his gigantic massive lead destroyed by a scandal, the Democrats ran someone weak to make Bush look better at the ballot box.
Clinton was literally Bush's Arkansas cocaine/crack-running airstrip manager in Little Rock, and Clinton was hand-picked by Bush to be his successor. All other viable candidates had their careers destroyed so the "Comeback Kid" could emerge. The important thing that happened here was that Perot paid his way in, and was forced out when the Democrats/Republicans banned the League of Women Voters from being in charge of presidential debates, and started holding the debates themselves in order to prevent third-party candidates from succeeding. This was the big tell that they needed the election rigged, and both sides were already working in tandem to rig it.
Gore was literal obvious and blatant election fraud in Miami-Dade county, which Jeb was governor of at the time. Miami-Dade was so legendarily-fraudulent, it's cleanup in 2020 and 2022 had its election results literally buried by everyone that isn't on Mike Lindell's payroll. It was the literal gold standard of election corruption in the country, and we got to see the "Hanging Chad" fiasco first-hand, all thanks to Poppy Bush.
Obama is Dick Cheney's cousin. And Obama has the most "pristine" lineage. His aunt Angela can vouch for him. The Republican primaries were rigged against Ron Paul's clear overwhelming populist support, and they elevated Arizona Human Trafficking Kingpin John McCain to the head of the Republican ticket, so he could lose gracefully to the absolute royalty that was Obama. Heads they win, Tails, you lose. The rigging of the republican primary against Ron Paul's clear wins (in both 2008 and 2012!) was so obvious and blatant, it led to the Tea Party revolution, and eventually, Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz types being elected to the House.
Trump was installed by the same people that installed Kennedy and Reagan, using the same groundswell populism that resonated with the Tea Partiers. Despite confidence in every public name to ever be filmed by a television camera that he wouldn't win, Trump's 2016 Election was *un-rigged* in specific key counties to allow him a victory, leading to a cascade effect that the news was not able to handle to this day.
George Herbert Walker Bush was put to death in 2018 for his crimes against humanity, state, country, and the people, and given a state funeral. Pic related is his family being served legal documents as their father's body is marched past them for the last time.
You should be taking a deep, long, hard look at what your media told you happened during those events. History, and the information we've learned since, have long since proven the narrative we were sold about election results was very incorrect. Criminally so.
@unabomber@meowski@brad@BowsacNoodle@lichelordgodfrey While Carroll Quigley has a point about turnout but may be ignoring how that changes in bad years, and I’d yesterday found it very interesting that 1976 to 1980 turnout was down a tad, the talk/essay is very dated when it says “Since 1945 or so, we have had pretty close elections”
Just a few months later Nixon utterly smashed McGovern. Nixon!!! Yes, he had a major negative reputation long before. That’s also the first election I followed closely.
Also worth noting is that Quigley is talking about the political scene of revealed preferences (voting minus cheating) before the New Left took control of the Democratic party post-1968 (and 1968 was totally wild and very important, enough so my parents had me watch it, although it was a few years before I understood why it was so important Nixon won).
Since then we’ve had two more landslides, 1980 and 1984, pretty much mirrors of 1968 and 1972, even with a somewhat significant third candidate in 1980 (John Anderson who got 6.6% of the vote, that’s not small).
Looking further, you could score 1988 as a landslide, that’s because Dukakis was just that bad and we hadn’t learned how bad the Bush family was. 1996 was not close because Dole was that bad, Perot was again a spoiler, and Bill Clinton had sufficiently recovered from his massive mistakes in his first two years (he and Hillary had even followed the same pattern in Arkansas!). And 2008 wasn’t close.
I’ll save the essay and (maybe) look at it sometime soon.
@anornymorse@meowski@brad@lichelordgodfrey@ThatWouldBeTelling@unabomber Interesting read. If there's one thing I've learned over time it's that the media doesn't tell the truth, and they official narratives are always lies. Perot and the LOWV is an interesting one. Some of the power players involved there are pretty interesting to read up on.
@Quentel@meowski@brad@BowsacNoodle@idea_enjoyer@lichelordgodfrey@ThatWouldBeTelling@unabomber Even the Fox News people covering that story had so much faith in the security and safety of computers that they sent each other incriminating emails and texts saying stuff along the lines of "this story we're running is obviously bullshit". I really think people can't appreciate how finnicky and unreliable these things can be in practice unless they work with code.
Most people didn't seem to notice how fast they were able to memory-hole the dominion issues. Chances are high that bringing attention to the dominion data handling made the entities that actually run things somewhat uncomfortable.
It seems very hard for some people to accept the fact that the US voting system has been completely captured. The people's vooots cannot count for anything if the system contains large systemic imbalances.
@Quentel@meowski@brad@BowsacNoodle@idea_enjoyer@lichelordgodfrey@ThatWouldBeTelling@unabomber I think a big problem is even though most people carry around supercomputers in their pockets, the vast majority are still functionally computer illiterate. They don't understand that software just does whatever the person who programmed it (or is currently exploiting it) tells it to do and instead assume that it's "smart" or "safe". Like people who think ChatGPT is alive and is their friend.
@Quentel@meowski@brad@lichelordgodfrey@ThatWouldBeTelling@unabomber Uniparty existence does not mean one singular faction with pure kayfabe distinctions. What shared values and beliefs and goals do these elected officials actually have at the voting level? When congress is in session, what are they doing? The things they agree on and the things they choose to ignore, even their particular paradigms of thinking, however detached from normalcy those may be, make up the uniparty.
Even if the Democrats and GOPe are united in their hatred of Trump, whites/flyover people, fossil fuel consumption by proles etc. it still matters very much to each who wins the various elections. And political positions inside the institutions, government as well as party.
Plus the Democrats are “non-agreement capable” as Russia generally noted about the US Deep State (all Democrats of course) when Obama was President. See Manchin and something about energy for example.
And now Fulton County DA Is going after state GOP members; does anyone know if they’re not really part of the state GOPe or might they have some (public) sympathies about Trump? Or are otherwise not part of the corrupt bargain?
I go back to my general point, and this has been true in US elections since the founding, may have caused Edgar Allen Poe’s death, not a single thing will stop cheating other than diligence by the other political party or parties.
Thus our system has defenses built into its federalism, you have to cheat enough across enough states, House Congressional districts and counties. For that matter, then the still in office Congress has the final say.
OK, one more thing is that by 2020 Trump’s general failures in office and election pandering made him a much less attractive candidate. And COVID probably ensured it would be “close,” plus the Democrats decided to burn down their own cities….
One of the most telling things about all this is how successful a man can be by simply not hating white people.
He’s got other races he prefers, but his default which he often says is that everyone is great.
The people that kept talking about physical 'chain-of-custody' seemed to believe that after the data was entered and sent to wherever, that it couldn't be intercepted, modified, or tampered with. There are many security vulnerabilities that can be exploited in a digital system.
The key is that you appear to have no concept there could be factions inside it.
To take an extremely stark and very well established example, it’s clear the US Deep State is of at least two minds about the PRC/CCP/Xi. “Biden” was just plain bought by them (also see McConnell), see (((Blinken’s))) weakness with them, and (((Yellen’s))) behavior in that last visit was so bizarre they’re running a “she ate magic mushrooms” claim (granted, I wouldn’t put such a trick past Xi/the CCP).
On the other hand, Xi’s Made in China 2025 campaign is as stone cold dead as his Zero COVID policy after we embargoed everything having to do with advanced chips. They’re now stuck at least four generations behind world leader TSMC (T for Taiwan…) for logic, and their state champion for flash memory had just been qualified by Apple.
So there are factions, all sorts of factions. Going back to Trump, he got a heads up from the director of the NSA Mike Rogers that the Deep State was spying on him post-election, or so we were told which resulted in their immediately decamping from the in inherently insecure Trump Tower in NYC.
Going back to my point, there’s a very obvious set of two factions in the Democrats and Republicans. Many of them will cooperate for what they believe to be their common good, or here their common enemy of Trump, but that doesn’t mean they’re otherwise unified unless they’re for example genuinely part of the country’s Ruling Class as Angelo Codevilla broken it down, them vs. the “Country Class.”
Or see how for the longest time to become a Supreme Court justice you had gone to either Harvard or Yale Law School, a record broken when Notre Dame Law School alum Amy Barrett was elevated to the court.