I Pit the ID-demanding GOP vote-suppressors (Part 1)

[Bricker]

@elucidator

Day-um, Counselor, how many times we been over this? I described the events as being “sordid”, you replied that even though that word had connotations of disapproval, it wasn’t sufficient disapproval, so that was pretty much the same thing as approval. Which is horseshit.

C’mon, Rick! Play hard, play fair. You’ll still lose, because you are wrong, but you’ll be the better man for it. And when you boil it down, that’s…

WINNING!!

You described the event as ‘sordid,’ yes: you said the Republicans “dared” the Democrats to commit a sordid and partisan act. here’s your post:

@elucidator

I’m a big fan of moral parity, the balancing of the ying-yang, karma. When the Pubbies have power (as recently demonstrated), they behave with sublime indifference to any such civic considerations, they grasp for power by means legitimate, illegitimate, and downright illegal.

Balance. If the Dems run totally roughshod over the Pubbies, ride 'em and spank 'em for a couple of years, three maybe, then the balance may be restored.

The Pubbies bluffed, and got called. They refused any accomodation to the facts, and dared the Dems to commit a sordid and partisan act. The Dems called, they rake in the pot and now the Pubbies play the only card they got: they blubber the tears crockidilian of the dreadful display of corruption and immorality, the little drops splashing on their freshly-starched communion dress.

C’mon. Who’s kidding who, here?

The point of such legal formalities is to protect the will of the people, no? Does anyone seriously doubt that the will of the people of Massachussets is to have a Dem take Kennedy’s seat?

If an action be perfectly legal and thwarts the will of the people, it is not legitimate. By the same token, if an action manifests that will, it carries a legitimacy. The Pubbies could have avoided this outcome by shrugging and accepting the inevitable, maybe pick up a small bargaining chip, maybe win Miss Congeniality, something like that.

But they made a fight out of it hoping for just this result, perhaps in their mind this balances out trying to corrupt the Justice Dept, I dunno. But now they get to piss and moan, bitch and perform about this travesty yadda-blah, yadda-blah…

Feh! as they say in Lubbock.

This is not strong condemnation.

It’s not weak condemnation. It’s approval.

@BrainGlutton

Once again, Bricker, your intellectual dishonesty disgraces the legal profession.

Read his post. Who is being honest here?

[Bricker]

@MaxTheVool

If he posted somewhere saying that the he SUPPORTED the Democratic action, AND if someone (you or someone else) actually made an argument demonstrating similarities between those shenanigans and voter ID laws (because things that kind of sound similar aren’t automatically similar just because Bricker mentions them in the same post) then you have a strong case that Elucidator is a hypocrite. Whatever that buys you.

OK, there’s his post. You tell me.

[elucidator]

I see nothing whatever in that post that signifies approval. Nor anything I would change or disavow. Simply because I understand human failing, or even sympathize, does not mean I approve. I disapprove of the Republicans more, for reasons clearly stated. And I don’t need your approval any more than a duck needs a raincoat.

[ElvisL1ves]

@MaxTheVool

I don’t think it’s quite that simple. Would you support a law that tripled the number of polling stations… but was written in such a way that the new polling stations would, for apparently neutral reasons, end up almost entirely in regions that demographically leaned towards the party that was proposing that law?

Of course not - I did not address equal protection because I thought that was an understood given. Obviously it isn’t. The same ease of voting applies to everyone.

It’s not surprising to see Bricker still - *still *- pouting about not getting to replace Kennedy with an appointed Republican, in spite of the method the principles of democracy would otherwise dictate.

[Lobohan]

@Bricker

OK, there’s his post. You tell me.

He was being clever. And you’re still a terrible person for exulting in making voting harder just so your ratfuck cronies can unjustly keep power.

[Bricker]

@Lobohan

He was being clever. And you’re still a terrible person for exulting in making voting harder just so your ratfuck cronies can unjustly keep power.

What kind of conversation are we going to have on November 5 of this year?

I think it’ll be a fun one.

[Lobohan]

@Bricker

What kind of conversation are we going to have on November 5 of this year?

I think it’ll be a fun one.

I don’t know. I’m hardy confident that evil men like you and the people you vote for (who keep America executing prisoners, by the way, so chuckle about that) won’t win.

You’re a bad person. And bad people can win, because the world isn’t just. That isn’t news to anyone. But that doesn’t mean that good people shouldn’t do their best to fight worthless shits like you and yours.

So please be smug, it only paints the wretch that you are on the outside. <3

[BrainGlutton]

@Bricker

Read his post. Who is being honest here?

elucidator.

[BrainGlutton]

@Bricker

What kind of conversation are we going to have on November 5 of this year?

A very, very long one.

[adaher]

True or false: In order for democracy to work, the voting public has to be engaged and educated.

Before Democrats depended on the idle and ignorant class for election wins, there used to be no disagreement on this point.

What scares me is how easily the liberal logic of what elections should be now leads to the abolition of midterms, the Senate, and even voter registration. They’ve proven that they won’t stop until the system gives the “correct” result, and all of their efforts up till now have failed to achieve the goal of getting their base to actually vote. The only thing that has worked is to get a charismatic minority candidate at the top of the ticket. Which isn’t going to be possible in every Presidential election and is never possible in off-year elections.

[BrainGlutton]

@adaher

True or false: In order for democracy to work, the voting public has to be engaged and educated.

False. Elected officials need to be educated. The public only needs to know in general terms what it wants or doesn’t; officials work out the details.

[BrainGlutton]

@adaher

What scares me is how easily the liberal logic of what elections should be now leads to the abolition of midterms, the Senate, and even voter registration.

1. How?

2. So what?

[Lobohan]

@adaher

True or false: In order for democracy to work, the voting public has to be engaged and educated.

Before Democrats depended on the idle and ignorant class for election wins, there used to be no disagreement on this point.

You’re wrong. It’s the GOP that depends on ignorance, or more accurately, a system of completely false knowledge.

RW Media creates an alternate version of reality that is used to scare people into voting. Worse than ignorance, is actually believing and *acting on a set of facts that are not true. *

What scares me is how easily the liberal logic of what elections should be now leads to the abolition of midterms, the Senate, and even voter registration. They’ve proven that they won’t stop until the system gives the “correct” result, and all of their efforts up till now have failed to achieve the goal of getting their base to actually vote. The only thing that has worked is to get a charismatic minority candidate at the top of the ticket. Which isn’t going to be possible in every Presidential election and is never possible in off-year elections.

Again, the poor have less free time and mobility, so it’s harder for them to vote. But their votes should matter, and making it more difficult isn’t laudable. You don’t agree, because you’re a mindless partisan.

[Robot_Arm]

@adaher

What scares me is how easily the liberal logic of what elections should be now leads to the abolition of midterms, the Senate, and even voter registration.

The slope in your mind is slippery, indeed. Who is actually proposing any of that?

[ElvisL1ves]

Doesn’t “idle and ignorant” pretty well describe the Fox audience?

[Lobohan]

@ElvisL1ves

Doesn’t “idle and ignorant” pretty well describe the Fox audience?

Not necessarily idle. Adaher obviously sucks at Murdoch’s teat, but he brings the stupid with amazing ferocity.

[Bricker]

@BrainGlutton

A very, very long one.

I expect to be happy.

[Lobohan]

@Bricker

I expect to be happy.

Seems likely. It’s not like you’ve got a conscience.

[Robot_Arm]

@Bricker

I expect to be happy.

Seriously? With voter ID laws in so few states, I’d expect your lack of confidence in the results to be near crippling.

[BrainGlutton]

@Lobohan

You’re wrong. It’s the GOP that depends on ignorance, or more accurately, a system of completely false knowledge.

More about that here.

All this reminded me of Karen Armstrong’s discussion of mythos and logos in the introductory chapter of “The Battle for God” — two distinctly different ways of making sense of the world. “Logos,” Armstrong explained, “was the rational, pragmatic, and scientific thought that enabled men and women to function well in the world.” In contrast:

Myth was not concerned with practical matters, but with meaning. Unless we find some significance in our lives, we mortal men and women fall very easily into despair. The mythos of a society provided people with a context that made sense of their day-to-day lives; it directed their attention to the eternal and the universal. It was also rooted in what we would call the unconscious mind.

We all have need of both logos and mythos in our everyday lives. And yet, it’s obvious that liberals focus collectively and politically around logos — they don’t call it “the reality-based community” for nothing — while conservatives do the same around mythos, instead, albeit a rather paranoid version of it.

<snip>

But in the psycho-social world of #Benghazi, facts just don’t hold much sway. Mythos, not logos, is in charge there — and a very specific kind of mythos at that. To understand why that is, I turn to the work of Yale Law School professor Dan Kahan, starting with something he wrote at the highly respected Balkanization blog in 2005, with the provocative title, “What Fearless White Men Are Afraid Of.” He began:

Why are white men less concerned with all manner of risk (global warming, gun accidents, various medical procedures, etc.) than are women and minorities? Known as the “white male effect”… this phenomenon has long puzzled scholars of risk perception. Various hypotheses — that white men are more informed than women and minorities, that women and minorities feel more vulnerable or less able to protect themselves, that women (and perhaps minorities) are more empathetic than white men — have all been found wanting in empirical tests.

The phenomenon of “cultural cognition” suggests a different explanation, one that has been confirmed in a national study of culture and risk. The reason white males are less fearful of various risks is that they are more afraid of something else: namely, the loss of status they experience when activities symbolic of their cultural worldviews are stigmatized as socially undesirable.

<snip>

According to Kahan, there’s nothing special about white males; everyone engages in identity protective cognition. But it’s not hard to see that white males in America have a good deal more to lose than anyone else. It’s also not hard to see that white males make up the overwhelming majority of the House GOP Caucus, while they’re actually a minority among the Democratic Caucus. Thus, it would not be surprising at all to find the House GOP particularly in tune with white male fears more generally — fears that would also tend to be raised by the prospect of either a black man or a white woman holding the highest office in the land.

This was the prospect that Republicans faced in 2008. And it did not occur in a vacuum. After George W. Bush’s disputed “election” in 2000, he pursued an agenda that was strongly supported by conservatives at the time, but that had become widely discredited, even before the Wall Street crash of September 2008, leading to the Great Recession. To the extent that there had once appeared to be logos-based, rational/empirical foundations for the policies he had pursued, these foundations had crumbled into dust. Conservatism itself was in crisis, and there was no obvious logos-based way to try to rebuild it, even if conservatives had wanted to.

Instead, conservatives created a new mythos, reinventing themselves in the image of the Founding Fathers. Welcome to the Tea Party! Of course, it had nothing to do with the original Tea Party — Massachusetts was a high-tax colony before the Tea Party, and a high-tax colony it remained — but it was all about mythos, not logos. As long as the participants could feel themselves at one with the original Tea Party, no petty facts could get in their way. As Armstrong also explained:

Myth only became a reality when it was embodied in cult, rituals, and ceremonies which worked aesthetically upon worshipers, evoking within them a sense of sacred significance and enabling them to apprehend the deeper currents of existence.

But even before they identified themselves as the original patriots, they identified Barack Obama as the ultimate other — a socialist, a terrorist (or at least “palling around” with one), a Muslim, a foreigner trying to pretend he was an American … the ultimate Manchurian Candidate! Neither of these acts of identification was rooted in logos, both were almost exclusively products of mythos.