Exactly. The fraction of our GDP that we spend on the machinery of conducting elections is down in the white noise. If we have to triple that spending in order to solve the problem of long lines on Election Day, it’ll still be down in the white noise. And it’s hard to believe it’ll take tripling the cost of elections in order to take care of this.
Bricker’s whole “but what if it costs a trillion jillion dollars” rap is completely disingenuous. It’s as if we said we’d spend whatever it takes to fix that leaky toilet, having a good idea of what plumbers charge these days, and knowing that “whatever it takes” will be far less than the cost of that Caribbean vacation we took last year - IOW, well within affordability - while Bricker’s been saying, “suppose it costs you half a million dollars to fix the toilet, are you still going to spend whatever it takes?”
Bricker, I know you have to be somewhat pedantic in the practice of law, but, dude, leave it at the door.
Bricker: Before I get to responding to your post, you skipped over what I think is the key bit of my post, at least as concerns the actual substance of what we’re discussing here:
You know, I was thinking about that myself, and it’s an interesting question. In fact, I’ve felt a bit recently like I’m trying to set myself up as Bricker’s Personal Critic or something, where I just follow you around the board and criticize your posting style. Which is certainly not a role I consciously decided to adopt, and in fact is a pretty ridiculous and unfair way to act.
So why do I keep falling into that role? Well, partly at least, you should take it as a compliment of sorts. I think you may be the single poster whose actions and posts most clearly influence discourse on the board. That is, if you woke up tomorrow and suddenly started posting in a totally different style, or about totally different topics, or with totally different views, that would change things more than any other one poster undergoing a similar transformation. So if I want the SDMB to be a better place, I might as well put my effort where it matters.
Another way of looking it is that there’s a frequently acknowledged problem that the board lacks eloquent conservative voices. We have plenty of eloquent liberal voices (and plenty of non-eloquent liberal voices of various types). And there are a reasonable collection of non-eloquent snipe-y conservatives. But there are very few eloquent-but-willing-to-engage conservatives… which is a role that you very clearly CAN fill, both because you’re clearly intelligent and articulate, and because in fact you filled that role quite well in the past (and sometimes still do). And yet I don’t think you really do fill that role a fair bit of the time, for various reasons such as the ones we’re arguing about in this very thread.
Dunno. Depends on what you mean by “must”. Also kinda depends whether you think it’s within the realm of human capability for a discussion on a topic that important in an environment like this one to really be conducted totally fairly.
Not even. Just that they endorsed a 3rd party article. In fact, I wouldn’t even say endorsed. I just wanted to put the opinion out there and legitimize via the Cato Institute’s twitter seal of approval rather than my own.
I tried looking for the specific article but couldn’t find it. This is a similar one though:
Sure – I responded to the weakest argument, and the one which fit my admitted bias.
That’s not to say that my choice was ludicrous. And, again, you impose on me your desire that I act with generosity of interpretation, and yet forgive my interlocutors, who are allowed to post “without thinking things through” and then relentless defend their views, instead of retracting them.
Firstly – thanks for acknowledging this. It would have been easy to feign ignorance of the accusation; it does not lend itself easily to citable proof.
Secondly – I do take it as a compliment. So, thanks again.
But I’d like to suggest a possible additional motive, one you don’t mention, or don’t interpret in quite the same way.
You remonstrate with me because I respond – I consider what you say, I answer the points you raise, and don’t hide behind the crowd. How could I? What crowd supports my position?
You don’t take your fellow liberals to task because you sense that – for those that act unreasonably – they would not respond like that at all.
having an immigration policy that welcomes all does not mean that there would not be any process for those to emigrate here. Look at Ellis Island. It was basically a “welcome all” policy, as we needed workers, but there was a process that people had to go through. They knew who you were, where you came from, where you were going, health status, etc. So, if we were to have an “open borders” immigration policy, there would still be procedures people had to go through. Those who came here without going through the process would be here illegally.
Contrasting your post to the one that you were responding to, you did imply, perhaps accidentally, that the Cato Institute did not make a distinction between legal and illegal immigrants. Glad we cleared that up.
You seem to be unaware of the caps by country on allowed immigration - typically effectively unlimited for northern Europeans, finite numbers for souther Europeans, and typically *zero *for Asians or Africans.
Beg pardon, but I thought there was more than that simple question here. There seemed to be an argument attempted, about a connection between demanding fairness of the voting process, and whether similar fairness should be demanded of the discussion about demanding fairness in the voting process.
If you are trying to make no such connection, but are simply asking whether this discussion about voting rights should be conducted fairly, with no supporting argument at all, then I have misunderstood you.
And I would reply: it should be conducted as fairly as any other discussion in the Pit.
ETA: that said, I’m here to talk about voting. I’m not here to talk about talking about voting, or to talk about talking about talking about voting.
I was trying to rebut the facile dismissal of demands for fairness. Actual fairness under the law is a clearly different arena, one in which one may assert his demand for fairness by legal means; fairness in treatment was the plea from the hypothetical nine year old child, and from me here.
No, pancakes, it’s a fine example of how political advantage and simple bigotry can be cloaked in respectable robes. Then, “we” didn’t want “the wrong sort of people” in the country, just as now. “We” still don’t want “the wrong sort of people” to vote, but that too can be hidden. But the true motives are still as clear as ever, although the chronically fooled such as our friend magellan01 may never realize it themselves. In this case, a Cato version of immigration law is absolutely not supportable by history.
