I feel like Bernie Sanders could very well turn out to be another FDR type president. It was the sort of president I was hoping and hoping Obama would eventually become, but he let me down there. We need someone who really, earnestly cares about trying to better the nation for the sake of the majority, as opposed to the plutocratic few. I just hope that he can get the nomination. If not, I hope whoever does shares at least some of his goals...

Live in Oxford. This was very, very unexpected - but I have a feeling it had to do with the weather as well, as that depressed turnout somewhat in the south and in London especially. But I think it comes down to the 'shy Tory' syndrome that we had last year, where a lot of people didn't come out as wanting to Leave (and, if you look at the map of the results in England - the heavy Leave areas are the non-affluent ones. That says enough about the state of the UK). What is not unexpected is that Northern Ireland and Scotland voted to Remain...I do have to wonder if that might mean future independence referendums. For NI in particular, having a securitized border with the rest of Ireland could be seen as a betrayal of the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement.

This place really seems like quite a quaint and small little community full of some really nice people. Reddit I think just got a bit too hectic for me - it seemed every other day was some great conspiracy or outcry, and overall the community seemed quite rabid. It would be nice to be part of something a little more serene, I guess!

Ya know, as a young Muslim brown kid in America, I had two heroes - Malcolm X (post-Nation of Islam at least) and Muhammad Ali. Two guys that were prominent in a country where their names alone should have precluded them from any greatness or celebrity that used their voices to advocate for justice and their personal values. And hey, if they could do that, then maybe I could too.

RIP Muhammad Ali. You and what you stood for really meant the world to me.

It definitely wouldn't be a fair trial and I definitely admire what Edward Snowden did to really highlight just how much we've (very wrongly) sacrificed in the name of 'security' that is actually all just bullshit anyway. But at the same time I do have to wonder if maybe he would've gotten people even more outraged by what the government and the NSA has been doing if he hadn't have fled the country to begin with.

In my mind, at least, you can't have the concept of civil disobedience without also highlighting just how unfair the system is - I think it was Henry David Thoreau that wrote about how people campaigning for emancipation would refuse to pay taxes in the belief that that would support a government that endorsed slavery, but allowed themselves to be imprisoned for that 'crime'. The idea was to stick to what was morally right, even if it meant being legally wrong, and allowing yourself to be punished by the legal system to highlight just how morally repugnant the entire thing was.

Obviously whistleblowers are important and I think they should be treated with amnesty (though, it depends on what they reveal, in my opinion). Edward Snowden shouldn't be treated as some sort of fugitive, but at the same time the media concentrates on the 'spectacle', I suppose, of his self-imposed exile as opposed to focusing on the actual issues he revealed and I feel that if were he to be given a trial, it might turn the lens back on what actually matters. Or maybe I'm just being naive (probably am, in fairness).