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Hey Chris, You really have to live in the US for a while to fully appreciate the insanity of their election and overall political process. Both major political parties are diabolical. Both select presidential candidates which is either suffering from dementia or complete sociopaths. I guess each like picking the "best of breed". Once in a while someone "almost normal" slips through the cracks, but it's rare.

The lot of elected officials and candidates are practicing grifters and confidence tricksters. I believe grifting and confidence tricks are core to US's political process, specifically how campaign funding operates. Candidates need to promises contributors what they want to hear, whether they can deliver or not, to gain contributors' confidence and donations. Without confidence trickeries, political candidates could not afford to campaign for political offices. The process of campaign finance preselects the best grifting and confidence tricksters as political candidates.

For the complaining bloggers and activists that have their candidates lose elections, frankly they need to grow up. Everyone knows the rules going in. If they want to be involved in the process, they need to learn to lose gracefully. Unfortunately, (IMO) many of the Trump supporters are fascists and anarchists', looking to overthrow the electoral process and rule of law to install authoritarian leadership. They have no idea of ramifications. If there is an overthrow in the US, akin to France's 1789 and Russia's 1917 revolution, most-all insurrection leaders will be dead within a few years of the successful coup. The ignorance and arrogance of the revolutionaries have not looked to history for guidance. Political assassinations and imprisonment , murder for financial gain and tribalism drive functioning societies' infrastructure into unrecoverable chaos where 20% of the population dies within 10 years.

Both major political parties in the US are frankly made to look bizarre. In part, caused by media selling fear and continuing to polarize society. Some believe there is an underlying conspiracy, a hidden hand manipulating opinions. There is a hidden hand, but it's not a group of people directing media, its an overall corporate philosophy, radical Friedmanism sacrificing moral norms for cooperate profits.

Some proclaim historical and new, corporate boyars are attempting to undermine societies, eg Koch family, Musk, etc.. In my view the world is in a transition. Historically industrialist have influenced national politics and banking has influenced global politics. Globalization has created new opportunities for a new boyars, scraping their way to the top. If anyone, they are the ones looking to disrupt existing norms to create new, "land grab" opportunities.

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I disagree. The system favours Dems because they have low-information voters living in high density urban areas so they can rack up their ballot harvesting. The Republicans need to ban mail-in totally. Have elections as SA/Kenya does. One day with ID.

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Nov 14, 2022·edited Nov 14, 2022

Hey Chris, I hope you're doing well..

The challenge for the US is many elderly voters, voters with children without short term care, polling locations isolated from municipal, public transport, incapacitated due to illness as well as US citizens, military personnel, US govt employees deployed overseas do not have the ability to vote at domestic polling locations. The only alternative is mail-in voting.

Voting with ID in the US is not needed, each ballot and signature is verified multiple times by separate groups. In the last US elections, there were only a few occurrences of illegal voting and voter fraud. Ironically they were perpetrated by US Republican party voters.

Living in the US has really shown me both Dems and Rep voters are equally low-information. There is no monopoly on ignorance and stupidities of US voters. Both parties are corrupt, have absolutely insane factions, and legitimize some of the worst grifters imaginable. Remember Idi Amin and Teodor Mbasogo ? .... that level of insane. This place is a hot mess..

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Maybe they ran out of paper because China didn't print enough ballot papers?

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Preselected paper ballots...

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Baby killing is absolutely barbaric. Few people deny this. Two camps arise: those that say that there isn't baby killing, and those that say that the world and mankind are depraved and barbaric. There are more examples than anyone would like to admit of indisputable baby killing (I mean post-birth, even though pre-birth is still baby killing). In Japan, this problem has been a bit more common than some other countries, and there's even a modern form of the practice that has come to be referred to as "coin-operated locker babies". Even a society with long life spans that is regarded around the world as in many ways futuristic carries these barbaric practices into the present. Depravity is part of the human experience, and a worldview that obfuscates, ignores, or denies this will always have horrifying consequences. It is disgusting that we allow this in exchange for some nice-sounding political abstractions.

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