If you vote in North Carolina, you’re going to see this on your ballot. Looks pretty straightforward, right?
But it’s a trap placed by the GOP. âŹď¸âŹď¸âŹď¸
Voting “For” this referendum will remove the phrase “and every person who has been naturalized” from this section on voter eligibility in the NC constitution. This could place the future voting rights of about 400,000 naturalized US citizens in the state in jeopardy.
Just a reminder – it’s already illegal for non-citizens to vote! There’s no evidence that this happens in significant numbers anywhere in the country, and North Carolina has restrictions in place against it happening at all, like the voter ID law that’s now in effect.
(The voter ID law disproportionately affects POC, as well as transgender voters, both of whom are more likely to vote Democratic as well as lack the needed ID, but that’s another post.)
Voting “Against” on this measure will leave the state constitution unchanged.
Ballotpedia was extremely useful to me in looking up propositions; as it gave a lot of information on the propositions, most significantly who was opposed and pro each one as well as their reasoning.
I don’t know if this will be useful for your state, but in my personal experience of voting by mail in Arizona, it was a great tool.
I simply search for Arizona Proposition # in Ballotpedia’s search bar and then clicked on the proposition.
Jesus, I hadnât even thought of this, but of course.
This is something that historians have been warning about for a couple of decades. How much of our history was not just on Twitter, but on MySpace, on blogs and web sites that came down after a few years, on e-mail, on texts. None of that leaves a record. Once the file is deleted, the server shut down and scrapped, the backup disks decay into being unreadable junk, that history is gone.
Does anyone remember when Obama and Clinton each held town hall campaign events on MySpace? Good luck finding anything about those now other than some news articles that say they happened. How many business zoom calls have formal meeting minutes taken? We are not saving histories. We arenât even writing letters. Iâm as guilty as anyone. My art is online and kept in the cloud. I make my Christmas Card every year, but I havenât printed and mailed one in over a decade. Itâs all sent electronically. Meaning that a generation from now no one will remember.
So the problem is bigger than Twitter. We are now a couple of decades into an age that will not leave any detailed historical record.
Itâs thought this might just be a black spot of knowledge, there are organizations working to stop this â archival websites primarily, but these are not able to penetrate all these corporate gated gardens, where paywalls, sign up walls, and more block access to. There is an ongoing campaign by megacorps to shutdown as many archival sites as possible.
This coupled with the fallibility of hard drives, CDs (make sure to back them up! They only have a 20-30 year lifetime!), and more and there is a chance that even though there is more information than ever before, more primary and secondary sources than ever, we may become just a strange blank spot in societal and cultural history. Digital decay is a terrifying concept that we are already beginning to live through.
This is exactly what Iâve been saying. Itâs a loss of history. And, given how important it has been for activists of all sorts, it will be a loss for the future as well.
Star Trek yet again being accurate about future history (Picard saying âlittle is known about this era (the early 21st century) because much of the digital records are gone.â)
I think this article from The Guardian must have been one of the first, prominent ones to mention Digital Dark Age? Itâs from 2011, and itâs entitled
In case you need it for your D&D games or siege actionsâ here’s what the ballistic trajectory of a flaming pumpkin fired out of a trebuchet looks like.
Actually, this is very helpful for visualizing a ballistic arc.
Right? I’ve already sent it to my math teaching friends. One occasionally brings in a tiny trebuchet for his class and this might encourage him to up his game.
âThe calculus is straightforward. If Harris wins the election, it doesnât matter. Democratic administrations donât play that way. Donald Trumpâs do. We donât have to predict how a future Trump administration will act. We have plenty of evidence from the last one. Just ask AT&T and CNN. At a minimum, having Trump win after endorsing Harris invites a very unfriendly regulatory environment â and probably a lot worse than that. This is a bad sign well in advance of whatever happens on November 5th. And itâs an important reminder that without actually doing anything, he threatens, he sends a message, and the message is received. I will say again, we canât know for a certainty why the Post is choosing not to endorse anyone this year. But, seriously, what other possible explanation could there be? Theyâre afraid of antagonizing the Trump supporters in their reader base? Does that count for the LA Times too? Seriously, it doesnât pass the laugh test. We know whatâs going on here.â
amhrancas 