ourflagmeansbts:

Source l Source (Season 1 - March 16th 2023)

(via ofmdaily)

catchymemes:

(via forgetfuldragon)

wizlor4:

steakplissken:

charlesoberonn:

That’s not how demographics work.

It could be if we’re all brave enough

Reblog to turn everybody gay by 2047

(via creekfiend)

english-history-trip:

Jeanne Villepreux-Power went from being a dressmaker’s assistant to inventing the world’s first aquarium and becoming one of the most groundbreaking marine biologists of her day – yet few people know her name today.

Born in France in 1794, she first gained prominence after she made the wedding gown for Princess Caroline. This also led her to meeting English merchant James Power, who she married in 1818 in Sicily. They lived on the island for over twenty years and it was there that Villepreux-Power undertook a rigorous self-taught study of its flora and fauna with a particular interest in the marine ecology.

In 1832, she began to study the paper nautilus or Argonauta argo, pictured here. The prominent opinion at the time was that the nautilus took its shell from another organism. In order to test whether this was true, Villepreux-Power invented the first glass aquarium, which allowed her to study nautilus in a controlled environment. As a result, she discovered that the nautilus created its own shell. As she continued her research, Villepreux-Power also designed two aquarium variants, a glass apparatus within a cage, used for shallow-water studies, and another cage-like aquarium which scientists could raise and lower to different depths as needed.

In 1839, Villepreux-Power published “Physical Observations and Experiments on Several Marine and Terrestrial Animals”, her major work discussing the nautilus and other sea creatures she had studied. Increasingly renowned for her pioneering research, Villepreux-Power became the first female member of the Catania Accademia, as well as a member of over a dozen other scientific academies. In recent years, this trailblazing scientist and inventor was further recognized – a major crater on Venus discovered by the Magellan probe was named in her honor in 1997.

(Source: amightygirl.com, via butchzambo)

saloomy-memes:

(via bromeoblue)

funnytwittertweets:

(via rhetoricandlogic)

picckl:

Bad Influence 🍇

(via bromeoblue)

burimyuu:

(via cryptidfuckery)

rubykgrant:

roxylalonde:

shes fat

(via bromeoblue)

fandomsandfeminism:

thewynne:

fandomsandfeminism:

ralfmaximus:

fandomsandfeminism:

Ok, since some folks are still struggling with this: No, having a national popular vote for president wouldn’t mean that “just 2 or 3 states would pick the president.”

First of all, that’s *basically* what’s already happening with the Electoral College. Because the states are winner-take-all, it doesn’t matter if you lead in a state by 3% or 30%, you get 100% of the vote. So the only states worth campaigning in/listening to are a few swing states, where you need to eek out a 1% lead to win 100% of the points.

We see this in the actual campaign event data. Two thirds of the presidential and vice-presidential post-convention campaign events were conducted in just four states in 2012 (Ohio, Florida, Virginia, and Iowa). The electoral college doesn’t empower rural voters or small states. It just allows campaigns to hyper-focus on the undecided voters of swing states. So if you’re a centrist in Ohio, I guess the EC was tailor made for you? But no one else benefits here.

But, would this still happen in a national popular vote, you ask? NO. Of course not.

I don’t blame folks for not realizing this intrinsically. They are big numbers, and this “big states blah blah” rhetoric is pervasive. (Notice how often it’s “California and New York” though, and never Texas. Ask yourself why.)

Let’s assume, for fun, that 100% of the population of the country can and does vote. For rounding purposes, that’s 330 million people.

Even if you could get California, Texas, Florida, New York, and Pennsylvania to vote 100% unanimously for the same person, you’d fall woefully short of of 50%, and that’s getting EVERY SINGLE PERSON in these states to agree. You need the 9 most populated states to vote 100% turn out in unison to hit 50% of the population.

1. California (Population: 39,613,493)
2. Texas (Population: 29,730,311)
3. Florida (Population: 21,944,577)
4. New York (Population: 19,299,981)
5. Pennsylvania (Population: 12,804,123)
6. Illinois (Population: 12,569,321)
7. Ohio (Population: 11,714,618)
8. Georgia (Population: 10,830,007)
9. North Carolina (Population: 10,701,022)

But, as I’ve said many many times, states are not political monoliths. Despite what those red v blue electoral maps train you to think, these states aren’t hiveminds.

Both of these maps represent the 2016 election. Personally, I like the first one more, since the intensity of the color mirrors the amount of votes, but the second one really drives home how *blended* our communities are politically.

In 2020- 155,508,985 votes were cast. That’s 77,754,493 for 51%. How many states, at a minimum, would it take to reach that number based on how they actually voted? Well, let’s go from most populated down until we hit 51%.

• CA- 11,110,250 for Biden
• TX- 5,259,126 for Biden
• FL- 5,297,045 for Biden
• NY- 5,244,886 for Biden
• PN- 3,459,923 for Biden
• IL- 3,471,915 for Biden
• OH- 2,679,165 for Biden
• GA- 2,473,633 for Biden
• NC-2,684,292
• MI-2,804,040
• NJ-2,608,400
• VI-2,413,568
• WA-2,369,612
• AR-1,672,143
• TN-1,143,711 (we aren’t done yet)
• IN 1,242,498
• MASS 2,382,202
• MI 1,253,014
• MA 1,985,023
• CO-1,804,352
• WIS-1,630,866
• MIN- 1,717,077
• SC-1,091,541
• AL- 849,624 (We’re still only at 68 million, by the way)
• LA- 856,034
• KN- 772,474
• OR-1,340,383
• OK-503,890
• CN-1,080,831
• UT-560,282
• NV-703,486 (We’re getting close now, I promise)
• Iowa-759,061
• AR-423,932 (I’m so tired of adding these numbers up)
• MIS-539,398
• KA- 570,323
• NM- 501,614 (SO CLOSE I really thought this would do it.)
• Nebraska- 374,583 (DAMMIT NEBRASKA! We’re still short!)
• Idaho- 287,021

And that does it! That puts us above 77,754,493 and it only took every Biden vote from the 38 most populated states.

Hardly the “Californians and New Yorkers making all our decisions for us!” reality that people decry (Never Texas. Even though we had more Biden voters than New York. But Texas isn’t the standard boogeyman for a racially, ethnically, religiously diverse, queer coastal city. Even though Texas has 4 of the 10 largest cities in the country, more than California- Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, and Austin)

YES, a lot of people live in California. Yes, a lot of people live in Texas. Yes, it’s super weird to me that the city of San Antonio, Texas has almost 3x the number of people in the entire state of Wyoming. (I’m sorry if you think that Wyoming’s 73,491 votes for Biden should make or break the election.)

But please remember that individual states and districts still get their representation in Congress. (Which…I have some opinions about how much this actually impacts federal politics that are their own thing.) State governments and local governments still exist.

And this idea that a popular vote system, which we use for senators and governors and mayors and school boards is suddenly ~oppressive~ and ~tyrannical~ when we apply it to the presidency isn’t logical. (If 70% of your town lives in apartments, you don’t give folks in single family homes an extra vote to balance out their vote for mayor.)

Frankly, going to the popular vote should be a logical first step. Ranked choice ballots (for president and senate), and party proportional voting (for the house) would go a long way towards making people feel like their votes had real power again, increase voter turn out, and I think motivate the parties to better reflect the wishes of their constituents, reduce our political tribalism, and encourage third party participation.

Also, friendly reminder that the Electoral College was designed at a time when travel by horseback or carriage was the only option. 

Due to the size of the United States, it was physically impossible for people to travel to the seat of government to cast a vote, and deeply impractical to securely ship millions of paper ballots across the continent to be counted. So instead, they decided that states would send representative electors to vote the will of the people. 

These guys would make the trip, and vote as if they were the millions of people they represented. It worked!

But nowadays? In the age of instant cheap secure communication? That’s unnecessary and frankly, ludicrous.

I honestly kinda think this narrative is giving the founding fathers too much credit.

Because why would it be easier, safer, or more practical to send multiple representatives to do stand in votes based on a winner take all count of the ballots compared to…say…. sending a messenger with a letter that just said how many votes there were for each candidate in a state/district? The ballots are still getting counted in their home states, and the total could simply be calculated once all the messengers arrived.

The key aspect of why the electoral college exists is often forgotten because we never see it used- “faithless electors.” (We have had 165 faithless electors in US history, but they have never swung an election)

Electors *promise* to vote for whoever wins the popular vote in their state, but they don’t actually have to. Now, maybe you can think of some good reasons for this- like in 1872 when Greeley died between election day and when the college convened. Don’t want your states votes going to a dead guy, right?

But fundamentally, the purpose of the electors and their ability to vote for whoever they want is because the founders were worried that the ~common people~ would vote for…someone they didn’t like.

In Federalist 68, Hamilton writes that the electors would be “most likely to have the information and discernment” to make a good choice and to avoid the election of anyone “not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.”

His concern here mostly seems to be like… secret monarchy supporters winning the presidency and handing the country back over to the crown, but there is a very clear kind of elitism and classism that comes through as well.

The point of the EC, from the beginning, was to codify a distrust of the voters to choose a “good president” and build in a back door for those in power to undermine that vote if they wanted to.

And this was still in the time of only white land owning men being able to vote. (Land ownership wouldn’t be removed as a prerequisite for voting until Andrew Jackson.)

The founding fathers fundamentally did not trust Americans, even just the tiny sliver of Americans who could vote at the beginning, with voting. And I think it’s reasonable to say now that this was incredibly shitty of them, and this system is an outdated testament to those classist attitudes.

If you have 45 min-1 hr of podcast time the electoral college episode of You’re Wrong About goes into all of the above and more, including discussing how it incentivised Jim Crow-era voting laws in the 1920s-60s. Highly highly recommend.

Just to plug Ranked Choice Voting again- Alaska just switched to it. And it’s awesome

https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/2022/08/31/ranked-choice-totals-alaska-peltola/

(via i-have-a-dragon)

capricorn-born:

classycookiexo:

Oddly specific. Got a deposit for 6,837 today

(via azraeldigabriel)

werewolfetone:

werewolfetone:

Dear god. please make all superyachts explode tomorrow. amen.

Fave thing about this post is that nobody who’s reblogged it so far has made any comment. we’re all just sharing in the sentiment. peace and love on planet earth

(via chongoblog)