your periodic reminder that voter suppression is a very real problem in the south and that "haha just cut the south off they're just a bunch of racist rednecks" is a shitty, willfully ignorant attitude to have about the people that live here that can't vote for anything better

if you call yourself a leftist or a liberal and you have an attitude like that and then have the audacity to be like "Why Don't They Just Vote? Their Fault For Not Voting :)" you are completely and utterly failing the values you claim to support and should be ashamed of yourself

the shit that's happening in Kentucky right now happened in Georgia a few weeks ago and it will happen in every Southern state unless people start raising hell about it. Republicans have been rigging elections here for DECADES. It's not the people's fault.

everyone is so obsessed with the names of regions and states and cities and countries and nobody ever thinks about the people that actually live in these places just trying to scrape by in the face of a social structure with nothing but open contempt for their lives.

once again i encourage you all to read about the Kemp vs. Abrams governor's election in Georgia from a few years back. Abrams led a massive campaign to get people to fight against the suppression and vote, got a massive turnout... and lost, because Kemp counted the votes.

Kemp was in charge of counting the votes in the election he ran in, declared himself the winner, and everything just kept going on like nothing happened. This happened in front of god and everybody and nothing ever came of it.

There's no accountability for these people. They do whatever they want and get away with it because they write the rules.

The most common failing I see in liberals is a complete inability or unwillingness to recognize that things are worse in different parts of the country. They see the South electing poor-hating republicans despite widespread poverty and think "wow! they're so stupid there!"

There's too much faith in the word of law and the system. You're surprised to hear that Republicans constantly break the law in broad daylight and wonder how nobody has ever stopped them? Guess what! That's the way it's always been!

A lot of the time, there's not even any blue candidate for people to vote for. "Blue no matter who" doesn't go very far when no democrats are running at all.

"Why don't they just vote for someone that doesn't treat them like shit?" Because even if there IS someone running that is moderately better than any of the Republicans on the ticket, there are about five different ways that you can be completely legally denied the right to vote.

oh whoops oh no your voter registration got purged a week before the election oh boo hoo your fault for not checking the page once a day. what? you don't have a computer to check your registration status? have you tried driving to the library every day :)

fuckers write the laws and make the systems assuming you have an internet connection but then will fight tooth and nail to deny that internet access is an essential human right for functioning in today's society

"how DARE you criticize the system, you pinko commie fuck? the best thing for everyone is if there's one internet provider that charges whatever the hell it wants for your internet access. thats whats fair."

"but steven, you have a computer and access to the internet, doesn't that make you a hypocrite for speaking for people that don't?" no. dumbass. i am capable of listening to and empathizing with people who have lived different lives than me.

The voting districts are based on neighborhoods laid out back when it was still totally legal to racially segregate your neighborhood. Families were trapped in certain neighborhoods and are given shittier voting resources based on those neighborhoods. All still technically legal.

A technically legal system built on the bones of overt shameless racism. That's how it is in the South, and that's how it is in most of the country if you care enough to look hard enough.

Does that make you upset? Are you incredulous that an overt injustice like that is allowed to stand as a long-held institution? Good! You should be!

This is the way that it's always been, with Democrats filing off the edges in some places but refusing to actually replace the existing systems with something that's genuinely beneficial to the people.

Cops get millions of dollars. Troops get billions of dollars. Citizens get told go "Go Vote :)" and are given a single voting machine with a broken screen that only votes for Republicans.

If you're lucky maybe you get two machines and one can vote for a Democrat with policies indistinguishable from a Republican's.

nobody's been nasty about this thread yet but it's over 1k and that's my cue to slap the mute button