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From Vox
Good news! Scientists are throwing a sex party … for giant marine snails. -
A young queen conch. | Jennifer Doerr/NOAA SEFSC Galveston
Queen conchs in the Florida Keys are struggling to mate. Scientists are going to help them mingle.
The sex life of a conch is, for a snail, quite thrilling. In the spring and summer, the queen conch — a large, ornate species of marine snail — hunts for a mate in the warm, shallow waters of Florida and the Caribbean. Rather than slime along the ocean floor like many other mollusks do, conch (commonly pronounced “konk,” with a hard “k”) hop using a claw-shaped structure attached to their gooey innards. During mating season, conch will leap toward one another and pair up.
Things escalate from there.
“Have you seen a conch penis?” Andrew Kough, a marine biologist at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, asked me on the phone. (I had not.) “It’s insane.”
Positioned next to a female, shells touching, the male queen conch will extend a long, worm-like penis, also known as a verge, into her shell opening to deliver sperm. This can take many hours. Once they uncouple, the female will eventually lay her eggs on the seafloor in a crescent-shaped sac that looks a bit like dried ramen. A few days later, free-swimming baby conchs will hatch and float around for a while before settling in the sand, forming the next generation of queen conch.
Curtesy of Shedd Aquarium
A juvenile conch with its eyes poking out.
At least, that’s how it’s supposed to go.
In the last few decades, the sex lives of queen conchs have run into trouble. In Florida and other parts of the Caribbean, conchs are struggling to find mates, struggling to pair up, and thus failing to produce new conchs. Part of the problem is that the population is far smaller than it once was due to decades of overfishing and increasingly destructive hurricanes. That means they simply have trouble finding other conchs to mate with. Meanwhile, conchs in nearshore waters of the Florida Keys — affectionately referred to as the Conch Republic — are failing, for largely unknown reasons, to develop gonads, which are needed for sexual reproduction.
These problems are putting the future of queen conchs in danger. Earlier this year, the US listed them as federally threatened, meaning they could become at risk of extinction in the near future.
Allison Bailey/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
A queen conch in Grand Cayman, an island in the Cayman Islands.
But there’s now some good news for sex-starved conchs. This spring, a team of scientists will gather up queen conchs in shallow waters off the Florida Keys, where they’re isolated and failing to breed, and move them farther offshore where there are healthier conch populations. The idea is to give these queen conchs a better shot at finding a mate and, in doing so, help them recover.
The project, led by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC), is an example of what it often takes to save imperiled species in a world changed by humans. Conchs are now so rare that putting an end to overfishing isn’t enough. To survive, they need scientists to play matchmaker.
Meet the ridiculously goofy, delightful queen conch
The spiraled shell of a queen conch is beautiful and elegant. The animal’s soft body, however, is sort of the opposite of that. It looks like a jumble of flesh onto which have been stuck two giant googly eyes.
Fixed to the end of tentacle-like stocks, those eyes poke out of the conch’s shell like a periscope from a submarine. Though cartoonish, they’re useful. Conchs are likely more visual than most other snails, according to Gabriel Delgado, a conch researcher, and they use these eyes — which have rods and cones, as do a human’s — to find mates and avoid predators.
The queen conch is one of several dozen conch species worldwide, all of which are moderately large to very large marine snails. They’re found in and around the Caribbean, where they play a valuable role in the ecosystem: Conchs eat algae that can otherwise smother coral. (They tend to hang out in groups, which is why Delgado, an associate researcher at FWC, sometimes describes them as “marine cows.”) Queen conchs also provide homes for critters including a small fish, known as the conchfish, that lives within their shells.
Queen conchs are also prized by humans. These snails not only have attractive shells that tourists love to buy but also protein-rich flesh that people love to eat. (It’s not uncommon to find conch on the menu in seafood restaurants across the country.) Plus, these animals are easy to collect: Conchs live in shallow water, and they can’t really put up a fight.
These traits helped turn queen conch into the second-largest fishery in the Caribbean — and ultimately led to their woes.
Overfishing is a problem, but it’s not the only one
Decades of fishing for conch in the Caribbean — much of which is exported to the US for restaurants — has massively depleted the ocean of these animals. “Overfishing has caused population collapses throughout the range of the conch, leaving adult densities below that which would indicate successful reproduction,” according to a 2022 assessment by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
In Florida, however, overfishing is largely a problem of the past. Before 1985, fishing queen conch caused the population to crash until it was “threatened with extermination,” as newspapers wrote at the time. But that year, in light of these declines, all conch fishing was banned. In the four decades since, the queen has been well protected.
Courtesy of Shedd Aquarium
Young conchs in a bed of seagrass.
Nonetheless, these animals haven’t recovered. The most recent estimate, from 2022, suggests there are roughly 126,000 adult conchs in the Keys, Delgado said. That’s below an estimate from the 1990s. Three populations in Florida have disappeared altogether, according to NOAA. On average, the density of the animals is too low “for successful reproduction to be maintained throughout the region and for Florida to have a healthy self-recruiting population,” NOAA says.
Absent fishing, the barrier to recovery is largely linked to climate: Superstorms bury the mollusks alive and ocean warming can mess with their physical development. Before Hurricane Irma struck the Keys, in the fall of 2017, FWC measured roughly 700,000 adult queen conchs across the island chain. That’s well above the number of animals when the fishing ban went into effect. After the storm, however, researchers counted half as many; they believe the hurricane buried conchs under sand, killing them. Hurricane Ian, which hit Florida in 2022, also knocked the population back, Delgado said.
Then there’s the breeding problem. Many of the conchs that hang out in shallow waters near shore in the Keys, and especially the females, are incapable of reproducing. They’re not properly developing gonads, organs that produce eggs and sperm, Delgado’s research shows. The current theory, Delgado said, is that the temperatures there are just too extreme. Because the water is so shallow, it gets very cold in the winter and increasingly hot in the summer (climate change is exacerbating marine heat waves). Scientists are still untangling just how that could be impairing their development.
This means that, near the shoreline, there are very few conchs that can successfully reproduce. Those that can have trouble finding a mate. Delgado says it’s as though there were an apocalypse and only a few people survived, each on a different continent. “They’re going to have a hard time finding each other,” he said.
Courtesy of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission
A queen conch out of the water.
If humans have caused this conch apocalypse, humans can also help.
A solution to help conchs mingle
While conchs near shore are reproductively challenged, those farther offshore — close to the coral reef — are doing much better. In some regions, there are dozens of conchs in close proximity. They’re able to find each other, breed, and make babies, Delgado said.
In the coming weeks, Delgado’s team plans to search for conchs in shallow waters in the central Florida Keys, with funding from the Fish and Wildlife Foundation of Florida, an environmental nonprofit. The scientists will tag those they find and relocate them to a healthier group offshore. It’s essentially like dropping individuals who are alone and isolated in the country into a big city. Deeper water offshore is also less prone to temperature extremes, Delgado said, which means the relocated conchs should not have trouble developing the gonads needed for reproduction.
Courtesy of Shed Aquarium
Queen conch with its eyes pointing out.
Delgado wants to find at least 200 conchs to relocate. If all goes to plan, each of those animals will find their match (or more likely matches) in their new home. The researchers will then monitor the reproduction of those snails.
This intervention is not, by itself, going to save Florida’s conchs. It’s more of a pilot project that will help scientists understand the value of relocation services in helping a species recover. If these efforts do grow the offshore conch community, the state may continue to help conch mate in the years to come, perhaps on a much larger scale — especially if climate change continues to disrupt their sex lives.
Don’t ignore Sudan’s horrific conflict -
A man stands by as a fire rages in a livestock market area in al-Fasher, the capital of Sudan’s North Darfur state, on September 1, 2023, in the aftermath of bombardment by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). | AFP via Getty Images
More than 8 million people have been displaced during the war, and more than 13,000 people have been killed.
The world has no shortage of horrible stories — from the terror of October 7 and the widespread suffering in Gaza caused by Israel’s war to the ongoing refugee crisis in Syria, to Russia’s continuing assault on Ukraine.
But the reports coming out of Sudan these days are particularly appalling.
According to the UN, more than 8 million people have been displaced during the war, and more than 13,000 people have been killed. Almost half the population, 25 million people, are in need of humanitarian assistance — and they shouldn’t be lost in a sea of global suffering.
Almost one year ago, rival military factions in Sudan began fighting in the streets of the capital Khartoum, reigniting civil conflict that echoes the terrible ethnically motivated violence in the country’s Darfur region that shocked the world two decades ago.
The current civil war — between the government’s Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (called Hemedti) — has spread from the capital to other regions of the country, including Darfur in the west.
There, the majority-Arab RSF fighters are being accused of widespread, targeted killing and sexual violence against ethnic minorities in the region.
On top of that horror, the SAF and al-Burhan — the de facto leader of the country — have said they will suspend cross-border humanitarian aid delivery from neighboring Chad into RSF-controlled areas. The SAF claims, with some evidence, that weapons and supplies from the UAE make their way to the RSF via the eastern Chad-West Darfur border. But blocking aid would exacerbate the humanitarian crisis within Sudan.
While it might be easy to see this violence as cyclical or intractable, it would be a mistake to do so.
The tragedy in Sudan
Both the RSF and the SAF have shown “utter disregard for the laws of war,” as Human Rights Watch wrote in September, with both forces using shells and other explosives in densely populated civilian areas, while the RSF has looted supplies and raped women and children as young as 14 in the West Darfur city of Geneina.
The conflict started in Khartoum and the neighboring city of Omdurman but quickly spread into Darfur and east to Port Sudan, where al-Burhan and the SAF have set up a de facto capital, as the RSF now controls much of Khartoum.
Basic infrastructure and services are now essentially nonexistent in Khartoum.
“Large, large numbers of people moved out of the worst of the fighting in Khartoum and surrounding areas and have moved into towns and cities in eastern Sudan,” Susan Stigant, the Africa director for the US Institute of Peace, told me in an interview.
“That’s putting a tremendous amount of pressure on any of the capacities in those areas in terms of food, in terms of basic services, just in terms of places for people to be able to sleep. Port Sudan is just overflowing” with refugees.
Hundreds of thousands of people have moved from different parts of the Darfur region — particularly West Darfur — into refugee camps in eastern Chad, where conditions are incredibly difficult.
“People fled with nothing into a place where humanitarian response was not ready for that scale of emergency,” Trish Newport, head of emergency programs at Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), told me.
Some ethnic minority groups in Darfur, such as the Masalit, have been targeted by the RSF, much as they were in 2003.
A long path out of conflict
This battle for power had its seeds decades ago in the political machinations of Sudan’s former dictator Omar al-Bashir.
And though the RSF evolved from the Janjaweed militias Bashir empowered in the Darfur region 20 years ago and is accused of perpetuating somewhat similar crimes, this is not an inevitable historical repetition.
There seemed to be a break for Sudan after decades of autocratic rule and conflict in 2019, when the RSF and SAF together overthrew al-Bashir. Though there was broad popular and civil society mobilization for a change in leadership, “[Bashir] wasn’t overthrown by the popular movement directly,” Stigant said — it was a military coup that put him out of power. The short-lived transition to a civilian government ended with a second coup in 2021, leading to the power struggle between the RSF and the SAF.
The diplomatic and humanitarian responses to the Sudan conflict have been completely insufficient to meet the desperate need — both to stop Sudanese people’s suffering and to prevent the fighting from destabilizing other countries, Stigant said. “If you look at the Horn of Africa more broadly, there appears to be a reordering of the politics and the power. If, for example, the Rapid Support Forces push east in an offensive, then they’re getting uncomfortably close to the borders of Eritrea and Ethiopia.”
Sudan has seen significant conflict over the decades. Sudanese civil society has repeatedly demanded civilian rule, both in the lead-up to al-Bashir’s disposal and after al-Burhan’s second coup in 2021. “There was a courageous nationwide social movement that pushed for a power-sharing arrangement between civilians and the military and security in 2019 and 2020,” Stigant said. But “the power was never shifted away from the military and the security elites, and we wanted to talk about [the transition] in the way that the Sudanese envisioned it and that I think many people hoped that it would go.”
Since last April, there have been some efforts to try and broker a ceasefire in Sudan, but none has held. And stopping the violence will be critical to restoring critical humanitarian aid to Sudan’s people and a democratic transition — something that the Sudanese have demonstrated for and demanded.
The African region is critically undercovered in the media, and the Sudan war has suffered that fate, but the conflict and humanitarian situation will only continue to spiral if the international community keeps ignoring it.
Trumpists don’t need to fear a multiracial America -
A woman holds a sign expressing Latino support for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at his campaign rally at the Orange County Fair and Event Center, April 28, 2016, in Costa Mesa, California. | David McNew/AFP via Getty Images
High Hispanic turnout could actually benefit Trump, according to recent polls.
Since Barack Obama’s reelection in 2012, many conservatives have grown increasingly afraid of the republic they claim to love.
That year, America’s first Black president won about the same share of the white vote as Michael Dukakis in 1988, when the Democratic nominee lost 40 states. But for Obama, this was more than enough. Thanks to demographic change and high turnout among Black voters, he won the White House comfortably, even as roughly 60 percent of white voters backed his opponent.
Faced with Obama’s victory, many liberals celebrated the apparent emergence of a durable Democratic majority. Many conservatives, meanwhile, eulogized their dearly departed nation. “The demographics are changing. It’s not a traditional America anymore,” Bill O’Reilly declared on Fox News’s election night broadcast, as returns began looking unfavorable for Romney. “The white establishment is now the minority.”
The GOP leadership implored their party to reconcile itself to this new reality. In its “autopsy” of the Romney campaign, the Republican National Committee argued that “If Hispanic Americans hear that the GOP doesn’t want them in the United States, they won’t pay attention to our next sentence.” It counseled Republicans to embrace immigration reform.
But others on the right took the opposite view. In their eyes, moderating on immigration would only deepen the dispossession of “traditional America.” Conservatives needed to arrest demographic change, not acquiesce to it. Republicans had to keep left-leaning groups out of the country and those already here, away from the polls.
Right-wing intellectuals, meanwhile, rationalized contempt for liberal democratic norms. In a 2016 essay, Michael Anton argued that the “ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty” was turning the electorate “more left, more Democratic, less Republican, less republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle.” The left was therefore “on the cusp of a permanent victory,” and allowing the Democratic Party to wield power any longer would be tantamount to national suicide. A few months later, Anton became a senior White House official.
In the years since Trump’s election, many Republicans have embraced this apocalyptic outlook on immigration — and a related irreverence for democratic niceties.
And yet, during the same period, the right’s strategic fears of demographic change and majority rule have become increasingly misplaced. In recent elections and opinion polls, Republicans have made substantial gains with nonwhite voters, even as they’ve embraced a militantly nativist agenda. Indeed, in a New York Times/Sienna poll released over the weekend, Hispanic voters actually favor Trump over Joe Biden by a six-point margin.
At the same time, the GOP’s growing support among working-class voters has given the party an interest in making it easier for people to vote. Whereas high turnout used to reliably benefit the Democratic Party, today it is arguably the Republicans who have an interest in widespread voter participation.
The conservative movement still faces long-term demographic challenges, with the Christian right claiming scant support among America’s rising generations. But that is not a problem that can be solved by restricting immigration, passing voter ID laws, or advertising your movement’s enthusiasm for autocracy. To the contrary, such actions are likely to be counterproductive.
Of course, none of this will be persuasive to white nationalists, who view demographic change as bad by definition. Yet white conservatives who have no problem with ethnic diversity per se, and simply worry that their values will be politically irrelevant in a multiracial America, should calm down.
Conservatives are radicalizing against immigration and democracy
A few years ago, the idea that a rootless, cosmopolitan elite was attempting to replace America’s white majority through lax immigration enforcement was a far-right conspiracy theory. Today, it is something approaching Republican orthodoxy.
Mike Johnson, the GOP speaker of the House, has espoused a version of “the great replacement” theory, albeit one shorn of explicit racial content. In May 2022, Johnson declared that Democrats “intentionally open our borders” because they want to “TURN ILLEGALS INTO VOTERS!”
Republican Sen. J.D. Vance expressed similar sentiments that same year, explaining that Democrats “have decided that they can’t win reelection in 2022 unless they bring in a large number of new voters to replace the voters that are already here.” Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt has also accused Democrats of “fundamentally trying to change the country” through immigration.
Earlier this month, Elon Musk posted that “Almost every illegal is a Dem voter. Therefore, the Dem Party will not take action until they lose more votes due to ushering in vast numbers of illegals than they gain.”
For his part, Donald Trump gestured at the theory in remarks to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) over the weekend, saying that his “first and most urgent action” as president would be to “send Joe Biden’s illegal aliens back home.”
This rhetoric is incomprehensible unless one posits that by “illegals,” Republicans really mean “recent nonwhite immigrants.” Undocumented immigrants cannot vote by definition. And evidence for widespread voter fraud among such immigrants is nonexistent. What is true is that asylum-seekers and undocumented immigrants are heavily nonwhite, that nonwhite voters are heavily Democratic, and that conservatives have lost some political and cultural influence as the US population has grown more diverse.
The right’s fundamental complaint then is not with undocumented immigration or voter fraud, but rather, the political implications of legal forms of immigration and voter participation. Tucker Carlson copped to this position on Fox News in 2021, when he argued that “the immigration Act of 1965” was a worse “attack on democracy” than the January 6 insurrection. “That law completely changed the composition of America’s voter rolls, purely to benefit the Democratic Party,” Carlson said. “That seems like kind of an assault on democracy, a permanent one.”
If conservatives want to keep presumptively Democratic-leaning groups out of the country, they’ve also grown preoccupied with keeping them away from the polls by curtailing voting rights and accessibility. Trump continues to mount a personal crusade against mail-in voting, telling Fox News’s Laura Ingraham this month that states where voters can mail their ballots “automatically have fraud.” Not all Republicans endorse that particular conspiracy theory, but 13 red states enacted new voting restrictions in 2023.
Not all conservatives were born in the USA
When Trump conquered the GOP, the party became more virulently nativist – and also, more popular with Hispanic Americans.
In 2016, Trump won 29 percent of the Hispanic vote, which was roughly comparable to Mitt Romney’s showing in 2012, according to the Democratic data firm Catalist. But four years later, his share of the demographic swelled to 37 percent.
Initially, many attributed Trump’s gains to unique features of the 2020 cycle. Latinos were disproportionately likely to lose work as a result of shutdowns, and might therefore have backed the less COVID-conscious candidate out of fear of unemployment.
But subsequent elections and polling indicate that many Hispanic voters have durably realigned. In the 2022 midterm elections, Republican candidates won roughly the same share of Latinos as Trump had two years earlier.
And there’s reason to believe that this result actually masked a broader rightward shift among Hispanic voters writ large. According to a June 2023 report from Equis, a progressive research organization, Latino voters who cast a ballot in 2020 – but sat out the 2022 election — favor a Republican over Biden by a 54 percent to 34 percent margin.
As noted above, Trump leads Biden with Hispanic voters by 6 points in the latest Times/Siena poll. And other surveys have produced similar results. A CNBC poll released in December found Latinos supporting Trump over Biden by a 5-point margin. The following month, a USA Today/Suffolk University poll produced the same result.
These findings should be taken with a grain of salt. Bidenwon 63 percent of Latino voters just four years ago; it would be extremely unusual for a demographic group to swing by more than 13 points in the span of a single election cycle. Nevertheless, the broader polling data indicates that Trump has expanded his support among Hispanic voters substantially.
Public opinion data also suggests that Republicans could win an even larger share of Latinos if they had a slightly less hateful standard-bearer. In recent surveys, Hispanic voters have tended to express a preference for Republicans over Democrats on inflation and handling the economy, while roughly two-thirds say Biden has accomplished not that much, little, or nothing in office.
On immigration policy, however, the demographic’s views remain to the left of the American public’s writ large. It’s reasonable to suspect, therefore, that a GOP nominee who didn’t want to deport longtime US residents en masse might win a larger share of the voting bloc. And in fact, Trump’s main primary rival, Nikki Haley, boasts a 12-point lead over Biden among Hispanic voters, in the new Times/Siena poll.
To be sure, Hispanic voters still say the Democratic Party cares more about people like them than Republicans do. And they hold many left-of-center views on issues as varied as environmental regulation, health care, and gun control. Yet the GOP has made essentially no effort to counter the impression that it cares little about Latinos as a group. And the fact that Hispanic Americans are torn between liberal impulses on some policy questions, and conservative ones on others, makes them no different than many other voting blocs. The same could be said of working-class whites in the industrial Midwest. Yet that group’s liberal views on abortion and health care policy have not prevented them from voting for Republicans by landslide margins.
Recent immigrants are no more inherently hostile to Republican politics than third- or fourth-generation ones. To the contrary, foreign-born Latinos tend to be less supportive of abortion rights than the US public as a whole, while foreign-born Black immigrants are more opposed to marriage for same-sex couples.
Naturalized US citizens are also more likely than native-born ones to say that they are “very proud” to be American, to be religiously observant, and to care for their elders. It is therefore conceivable that increasing restrictions on immigration would accelerate the American public’s drift away from social conservatism.
Of course, none of this will matter much to conservatives who oppose nonwhite immigration out of sheer racism. Nor will it provide comfort to those who believe that immigrants drive down native-born Americans’ wages or (more plausibly) increase their housing costs. But those who share Michael Anton’s fear that allowing more nonwhite people into the country will hand Democrats a “permanent victory” should know that this simply is not true.
Voter suppression doesn’t necessarily help Republicans win elections.
If the GOP’s hostility toward immigrants is plausibly counterproductive in political terms, this is even more true of the party’s attempts to make voting more difficult.
For much of the modern era, Democrats have enjoyed disproportionate support among young, low-income, and nonwhite Americans, who all have a lower propensity to vote than US adults as a whole. For this reason, high levels of voter turnout tended to increase the party’s odds of victory.
But Trump’s ascendance accelerated a decades-long, leftward shift among college-educated voters, a group that has an exceptionally high propensity to vote. In 2012, Obama won 46 percent of college-educated white voters; eight years later, Biden won 54 percent of the demographic.
This has dramatically changed the relationship between turnout and partisan advantage. In a 2022 paper, political scientists at the universities of Auburn, Rice, and Texas A&M documented this shift. Drawing on correlations between partisan preference and propensity to vote obtained from survey data, the researchers simulated the impact that higher or lower rates of turnout would have had on recent US elections.
They found that Obama would have won by even larger margins had voter turnout been higher in 2008 and 2012, as voters who were on the fence about participating in those elections leaned Democratic. By 2016, however, Democrats ceased to derive an unambiguous benefit from higher levels of voter participation. Four years later, the partisan implications of higher turnout flipped: Had vote participation been 20 percent higher in 2020, then a pool of Trump-leaning marginal voters would have made their voices heard, and the Democratic Party’s vote share would have fallen by 0.6 percent, while a 20 percent reduction in turnout would have increased Biden’s margin by nearly a percentage point.
These findings have been borne out by subsequent polls and election results.
In 2023, Democrats routed Republicans in low-turnout special elections. This was partly due to the overrepresentation of college graduates in such elections; according to polling from the New York Times and Siena college, special election voters were about 10 percent more college educated than registered voters as a whole. But the Democrats’ advantage among high-propensity voters is deeper than the education divide. Within every demographic category in the Times/Siena poll, Democrats perform better with high-turnout voters than low-turnout ones. In other words: A white, college-educated voter who consistently casts a ballot in every federal election is much more likely to be Democratic than a white, college-educated American who rarely votes.
As noted above, Hispanic voters who sat out the 2022 midterm appear to be much more Republican than those who showed up at the polls that year. And this is true of the broader electorate. In December’s Times/Siena poll, Trump led Biden by 2 points among registered voters, but trailed the president by that same margin among likely voters. The more recent version of that poll shows Trump ahead with both likely voters and all registered ones, but he once again did worse with the former than the latter.
Last October, a Grinnell College survey found that 2020 Trump voters were 4 points less likely to say they were definitely going to cast a ballot this year than 2020 Biden voters. Around the same time, multiple surveys from Marquette University Law School found Biden performing 4 points better among likely voters than registered ones.
All this suggests that it is Republicans who have a political interest in making it easier for people to vote.
This is a difficult reality for both progressives and conservatives to digest. The left has a much stronger investment in the ideal of popular sovereignty than the right does. And for decades, partisan interest reinforced this ideological divergence. As far back as 2002, Mitch McConnell was arguing that “voting is a privilege” from the Senate floor.
But now, any reform that marginally increases the difficulty of casting a ballot threatens to deter more Republicans than Democrats. Of course, there are still ways for the GOP to disenfranchise left-leaning voters specifically. Slashing resources for heavily Democratic precincts, or disenfranchising felons in states where the formerly incarcerated population is disproportionately Black, can benefit Republicans electorally. But voting restrictions that apply to all universally, such as reductions in voting hours or voter ID laws, may actually hurt the GOP’s cause.
The right should take a deep breath
All this said, conservatives do have cause for fearing that demographic change is rendering them a permanent minority on key policy questions. But this has less to do with immigration than generational replacement. Millennials and zoomers are much more socially liberal than their forebears. The Christian right’s agenda is already deeply unpopular in the US and is poised to grow steadily more so over time.
But that is not a problem that immigration or voting restrictions can solve. Fully dispensing with democracy altogether — and attempting to entrench a theocratic regime — is no more plausible an endeavor. You aren’t going to be able to dictatorially rule over a nation whose mass public and educated elite both overwhelmingly oppose you, and where every major center of economic growth is dominated by the political opposition.
Thus, the right simply has no alternative but to adapt to America’s changing demographic and cultural landscape. But as the developments of the past eight years demonstrate, this won’t require forfeiting all that conservatives hold dear. To the contrary, Republicans have managed to diversify their coalition even as they implemented a wildly unpopular revolution in abortion policy, and became more rightwing on immigration. Judging by recent polls, if the party were merely capable of nominating Nikki Haley — an extremely conservative politician by conventional metrics — it would be poised for a Reagan-esque popular-vote landslide.
So conservatives should stop hyperventilating about their “great replacement” or the left’s “permanent victory.” For the right, demography is not doom. Republicans are doing just fine. The party may need to make some adjustments in order to thrive in an increasingly multiracial America. But it is possible to assemble a rainbow coalition of reactionaries. Indeed, if polls are to be believed, Trump is on his way to doing just that.
From The Hindu: Sports
Amazing Ruler, La Maqueen, Vyasa, Cascais, Corinthian, and Multisided catch the eye -
2012 series against England was turning point of my career: Ashwin - Twelve years later, Ashwin looked back at the turning point of his remarkable career, which now features 507 Test wickets.
World Olympic boxing qualifier - Busto Arsizio (Italy)
Daria Kudashova ousts sixth seed Fanny Ostlund -
Angad Vir Singh Bajwa tops skeet in National trials -
From The Hindu: National News
99 kg of hashish worth ₹108 crore seized near Mandapam during bid to smuggle to Sri Lanka -
BJP challenges INDIA bloc parties on A. Raja’s remarks - Former Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said the BJP ‘vehemently condemned’ Raja’s remarks, which he termed ‘Maoist ideology’
Here are the big stories from Karnataka today - Welcome to the Karnataka Today newsletter, your guide from The Hindu on the major news stories to follow today. Curated and written by Nalme Nachiyar.
Sandeshkhali violence: NCW chief meets President Murmu, recommends President’s rule in West Bengal - National Commission for Women chairperson Rekha Sharma said the situation in West Bengal’s Sandeshkhali is still very dire
BRS, BSP to contest Lok Sabha polls together -
From BBC: Europe
In Ukraine, the show must go on - even underground - Kharkiv National Opera and Ballet is reopening underground, away from Russian drones and missiles.
Moment astronauts hug as they arrive at space station - The Endeavour spacecraft docked with the ISS after blasting off from Florida.
Tesla plant halts production after suspected arson - The factory, near Berlin, has been the subject of protests by eco activists, who deny involvement.
German call leak due to ‘individual error’ - minister - One participant in an air force meeting used an insecure line - allowing Russia to intercept the call.
Russian Black Sea ship ‘sunk in drone attack’ - Ukraine said sea drones were used to target Russia’s Sergei Kotov patrol ship near the Kerch Strait.
From Ars Technica
NASA cancels a multibillion-dollar satellite servicing demo mission - Congress kept throwing money at the OSAM-1 mission, but it faced continual delays. - link
This rare 11th century Islamic astrolabe is one of the oldest yet discovered - “A powerful record of scientific exchange between Arabs, Jews, & Christians over 100s of years.” - link
Hackers exploited Windows 0-day for 6 months after Microsoft knew of it - Technically, Microsoft doesn’t consider such bugs as vulnerabilities. It patched it anyway. - link
European crash tester says carmakers must bring back physical controls - In 2026, Euro NCAP points will be deducted if some controls aren’t physical. - link
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From Jokes Subreddit
There was a man who had 3 girlfriends -
There was a man who had 3 girlfriends, but he did not know which one to marry. So he decided to give each one $5000 and see how each of them spent it.
The 1st one went out and got a total makeover with the money. She got new clothes, a new hairdo, manicure, pedicure, the works, and tells the man, “I spent the money so I could look pretty for you because I love you so much.”
The 2nd one went out and bought new golf clubs, a CD player, a television, and a stereo and gave them to the man. She said, “I bought these gifts for you with the money because I love you so much.” The 3rd one takes the $5000 and invests it in the stock market, doubles her investment, returns the $5000 to the man and reinvests the rest. She says, “I am investing the rest of the money for our future because I love you so much.”
The man thought hard about how each of the women spent the money.
Finally, being a man he decided to marry the one with the biggest tits.
Many years ago, a rich man is having lunch with his doctor friend -
when they start discussing their sex lives.
“Sex with the wife is terrible! I can’t even get it up anymore” says the rich man.
“That’s sad to hear”, replies the doctor, “but all hope is not lost. You see, there’s this experimental pill called Viagra that’s just come out. It’s guaranteed to get you hard and erect for up to four hours.”
“Wow, that’s great! Can you get me some?”
“I could, but it’s an experimental drug. It’s quite expensive, like $20,000 a pill!”
“Oh, well I guess I have no choice, I have to try it because nothing else works.”
They make the arrangement for payment and the next day the wealthy man sees the doctor to get his pill. The doctor then instructs him.
“Take this an hour before you have sex, so the medication has time to be absorbed into your system. Afterwards you’ll be good for the next four hour until the medication wears off.
“Ok,” says the wealthy man.
Later that evening the doctor receives a call from the wealthy man.
“Doc, I took the pill an hour before I expected my wife to be home, but she just called and said she got a last minute invite to a gala and will be five hours late! What do I do? This thing cost me a lot of money and it’s going to be wasted!”
“Well”, says the doctor, “Is the maid around? Maybe you could get with her?”
“The maid!? Why? I don’t need Viagra to fuck her!”
Doctor: Well, I’ve looked at your lab reports and I’m afraid I have some bad news… Karen: Don’t give me this lab nonsense, you bureaucratic paper pusher! I don’t believe Western medicine anyways! I’ve been following homeopathic medicine, faith-based approaches, and healing crystals all my life, and they never let me down. Now, will you do things my way, or do I need to talk to the hospital management? Doctor: Sure, sure, lady. We’ll do things your way. Does an astrology-based approach work for you? Karen: That’s better! Of course, it would! Doctor: What’s your birth sign? Karen: Cancer. Doctor: Well what a fucking coincidence.
Did you hear that Reddit is using post content, to train AI? -
With that said, crunchy ice cream because the bones are purple when a hat goes bark. If not for never, when will follow complete? Yes’nt sound drains the beholder of fuzzy water-slide lingo.
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Curtesy of Shedd Aquarium
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Allison Bailey/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
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Courtesy of Shedd Aquarium
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Courtesy of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission
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Courtesy of Shed Aquarium
