[Bread and Circuses - Politics and other Silliness]

If you ask President Donald Trump, he isn’t racist. To the contrary, he’s repeatedly said that he’s “the least racist person that you’ve ever encountered.” Trump’s actual record, however, tells a very different story. On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly made explicitly racist and otherwise bigoted remarks, from calling Mexican immigrants criminals and rapists, to proposing a ban on all Muslims entering the US, to suggesting a judge should recuse himself from a case solely because of the judge’s Mexican heritage. The trend has continued into his presidency. From stereotyping a Black reporter to pandering to white supremacists after they held a violent rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, to making a joke about the Trail of Tears , Trump hasn’t stopped with racist acts after his 2016 election. Most recently, Trump has called the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus the “Chinese virus” and “kung flu” — racist terms that tap into the kind of xenophobia that he latched onto during his 2...

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/11/electoral-college-gives-trump-and-gop-boost/576448/ Parker Richards November 23, 2018 There’s no consensus on abolishing the Electoral College, which has countered the popular vote in two of the past five presidential elections. Even in the pantheon of maligned features of the American republic—gerrymandering, the Senate, first-past-the-post, voter repression—the Electoral College stands out. It’s a chimera, a system that serves as a rubber stamp when it’s working well, and as a massive, semi-automatic check on the popular will when it’s not. Formed as a deliberative body, it now has only a ceremonial semblance of such a function. The position of elector is essentially a sinecure that conveys no real financial or reputational rewards. Almost half a century before Donald Trump became president, his victory was nearly undone. It was a close thing: The House of Representatives easily passed a constitutional amendment that would hav...

 https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/five-common-misconceptions-about-electoral-college/602596 Defenders of the Electoral College argue that it was created to combat majority tyranny and support federalism, and that it continues to serve those purposes. This stance depends on a profound misunderstanding of the history of the institution. November 29, 2019  G. Alan Tarr  Board of Governors Professor at Rutgers University-Camden    Two of the nation’s last three presidents won the presidency in the Electoral College, even though they lost the popular vote nationwide. In 2000, Al Gore outpolled George W. Bush by more than 540,000 votes but lost in the Electoral College, 271–266. Sixteen years later, Hillary Clinton tallied almost 3 million more votes than Donald Trump but lost decisively in the Electoral College, 306–232. And, as a recent New York Times poll suggested, the 2020 election could very well again deliver the pres...

  Bryan Fischer The Supreme Court has taken up a case from Washington state on “faithless electors,” that is, electors who pledge to vote for somebody then vote for somebody else. Many states have laws against doing that and prescribe fines for going rogue. The case is about whether states are permitted to do that. In order to answer that constitutional question, we first must understand how the Electoral College is supposed to work in the first place. Most Americans don’t have clue one. The electoral process designed by the Founders reflects the fundamental character of America’s republican form of government, in which the vast majority of decisions are not made directly by the people but rather by the people we have chosen to make these decisions for us.  America is a republic, not a democracy . Donald Trump is president because he won the Electoral College by trouncing Hillary Clinton 304-227. At the same time, Trump lost the popular vote by 2.8 million...

During President Donald J. Trump’s impeachment trial, we’ll hear a lot of talk about our rules for governing. One frequent claim is that our nation is a democracy. If we’ve become a democracy, it would represent a deep betrayal of our founders, who saw democracy as another form of tyranny. In fact, the word democracy appears nowhere in our nation’s two most fundamental documents, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. The founders laid the ground rules for a republic as written in the Constitution’s Article IV, Section 4, which guarantees “to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.” John Adams captured the essence of the difference between a democracy and republic when he said, “You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments; rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; rights derived from the Great Legislator of the Universe.” Contrast the framers’ vision of a republic with that of a democracy. In a democracy...

Debunking racism narrative re: Natives, slavery, WWII, South Africa, etc. Literally all of it. See Ron Unz and Stefan Molyneux for an easy overview

“Food desert.” When I hear that phrase I think of nomads riding bactrian camels across the Nefud in search of ancient grains. But, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, it means that you live more than one mile from a store that sells fresh produce or meat. Hardly the image most of us in tree-covered suburbia think of as a desert. The term, which has only been around about 25 years since being coined in the U.K., has recently attracted the attention of many local politicians who believe they can “out zone” free market forces. Unfortunately for them, Adam Smith’s invisible hand usually tends to win in these situations. The controversy started several years ago when all the cool kids decided that Walmarts were bad for communities. Using various forms of convoluted reasoning, many local governments essentially banned large super stores by enacting zoning size limits. Too big was bad. The stated goal was typically to save small stores from the competition of lar...