On 03/17/2015 08:15 AM, Doctor John wrote:
> On 17/03/15 02:03, Cousin Ricky wrote:
>> On 03/16/2015 05:21 PM, Doctor John wrote:
>>> Christine, stop pulling Francoise's pigtails! ...and all of you, it's
>>> not Ricky's fault that he was unlucky enough to be born in the US of A
>>
>> I'm not even /that/ lucky:
>>
>>     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CesHr99ezWE
>>
>
> 'The uploader has not made this video available in your country.'
>
> :-(

Great.  This technology was utilized so that global corporations such as 
The Google could do business in totalitarian countries such as China 
that wished to censor content based on geographic origin, but 
corporations seem to love it more than governments do.

The video is a commentary by John Oliver on the voting rights of 
residents of the USA's territories.

As you may have heard, the USA just celebrated the 50th anniversary of 
the march to Selma, Alabama.  The state violence on that march led to 
the passage of the Voting Rights Act, which assured the rights of black 
Americans to vote--a mere 95 years after the Constitution gave us this 
right.

A fact that sits uncomfortably in the back of the mind of every American 
who isn't a neocon[1] is that there are 4.1 million American citizens in 
Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands 
who still do not have the right to vote for president, and have no 
voting representation in Congress. Even worse, the Americans in American 
Samoa aren't even granted citizenship.  ([1]The neocons aren't even 
aware that we are Americans.)

As a Virgin Islander, I had considered this to be an artifact of the 
Constitution, which devotes all of half a sentence to the territories 
(article IV, section 3).  However, the video shows that this matter was 
decided in the Insular Cases in 1901, using horrifyingly racist 
reasoning.  What's more, even as racist as the Supreme Court was back 
then, it was a patronizing racism, rather than hate-based racism. 
(Science had not yet fully realized that race is a culturally relative 
artifact, not a biological reality.)  The court intended our 
disenfranchisement to be only temporary.

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