Only a tiny minority shares your antipathy for the actual laws, though. Since you contend the laws are in fact putting hurdles in front of poor people for partisan reasons, how do you explain this contradiction? If your claim were correct, we would expect to see majority opposition to the actual laws.
This is not an argument. As elucidator suggested, the choice to dodge and weave instead of respond is symptomatic of a lack of any solid argument. You cannot rebut the points I make, and are reduced to this sort of vile irrelevancy.
But since you’re liberal, no one will remonstrate you.
Bricker won’t talk to me any more. I’ve been dehorded.
My position is cleanly logical and, as far as I’ve seen unassailable.
You shouldn’t make a problem worse when you try to solve it. Simple enough. You shouldn’t set up a system that dissuades more people from voting than would have voted fraudulently. Especially when the problem (in-person voter fraud) is almost non-existent.
Your position, is, if I may paraphrase, “It’s legal, so fuck poor people, HAW HAW HAW.” Which is why you’re getting a lot of pushback. I’m vulgar and combative, you’re generally civil, so a quick reading might make you look a bit better. But on the merits of the actual arguments you’re failing utterly.
I await someone who can actually argue against my position. You just pick nits and attempt distractions.
I have rebutted your points. You were so utterly stupid and ideologically dizzy that you assumed when I said “need” I meant, "must be done in order to be in accordance with the law." Which is pretty dumb.
I’m a liberal, true. But I have an ID, and I’m pretty well off, so you don’t have to hate me. <3
I REMONSTRATE YOU, LIBERAL!!11 I cast thee out of this subfora!11
I’m trying to get on his good side.
Why would we expect that? Not everyone has the time or inclination to see beyond the lies you, the GOP, and RW media tell.
Voter ID is a catchprase that sounds good. The specific details of the laws require more attention to understand, and most people have better stuff to do. Like how many Catholics think the Immaculate Conception refers to Jesus. People don’t always pay attention and many carry a headline level understanding of issues.
Which works well for your guys, since, you know, you’re advocating some rancid shit.
You don’t get to simply declare that axiom.
I contend that the reason people are dissuaded is relevant to deciding the issue – this is the reason I have used the Voodoo Thought Experiment. I contend that if people are dissuaded for reasons that society does not consider reasonable, society is entitled to disregard their numbers when calculating whether the problem is made worse or better.
“If that were my argument,” he said drily, “I suppose I would be failing.”
Of course, it’s not.
He has one?
As any debate coach will tell you, a gratuitous assertion by one’s opponent may be equally gratuitously denied.
You have asserted that your position is the righteous one, and mine represents immorality.
I responded that morality is not subject to definitive measurement.
You agreed but said that morality is determined by our social consensus, and by virtue of the widespread agreement with your position, you enjoyed the advantage of that consensus.
I pointed out that, to the contrary, my position enjoyed the widespread agreement.
Now you say that people would agree with you, if only they really understood your position.
But that doesn’t help your position, since you invoked the wide social consensus to support your claim of moral advantage.
So we’re back to my denial that your position is the moral one.
Fine, argue that, “It is okay to make a problem worse while trying to fix it.”
Which is what you’ve been arguing, of course. Which is why you’re so pissy right now.
Superstitious fear of voodoo isn’t the same thing as actually putting hours of labor as a requirement to voting. Your thought experiment is nonsense.
Your argument, as you suggested above is, “It’s okay to make a problem worse when trying to fix it.” Which really ought to be translated to Latin and inscribed on the GOP’s heraldry.
Most people would agree that making poor people spend hours waiting in line so they can vote isn’t particularly nice. Especially when it makes the problem you’re trying to solve worse, and selectively hits one political party.
Most people would find that shitty.
And I pointed out that they don’t agree with you, they agree with a piece of your position. Making it harder for poor people to vote isn’t an inherent part of Voter ID.
See above. I’m saying that your position isn’t to institute Voter ID. It’s to support instituting it in a way that gives partisan advantage. Something most people certainly don’t agree with.
So stop lying, would ya?
Consensus for Voter ID, not for using Voter ID as a cudgel to hurt the poor.
Children know that fucking one player in a race is bad. Good ones, any way.
Another round of you stepping on the rake… Keep it up Sideshow Bricker…
Boy howdy! Social constructs, morality. consensus…make your head fairly swim what with the complex and nuanced thinkin’ goin’ on. Hooo-doggies!
Except, of course, for all the times that public policy, popular opinion and the law were all in harmony on injustice that can best be described as reprehensible. In my living memory, the Texas of my childhood, Jim Crow was popular as all git-out with people who were white.
So, anyway, just wondering how far you’ll go with this happy horseshit before you start in clarifying.
It’s not the same thing – but it is analogous. That means that there is a similarity between certain features they share, upon which a comparison may be based. If I say “Imagine a caterpillar in a cocoon, and you’ll see why you need to get out of the apartment and meet people,” you might object – as you have here – that people are not caterpillars. But the argument I am making there does not claim you are literally a caterpillar, but that your isolation and the caterpillar’s ensconcement are of similar quality.
More precisely to my argument, there is gradient scale of burden. As even you have conceded, it’s permissible to require people to wait in line ten minutes to vote. So obviously there is some lower limit that you agree is such a minimal burden that it can safely be ignored: if I could prove that some people chose not to vote because they needed to wait in line ten minutes, that would not justify calling the voting scheme immoral.
You and I disagree about how far that bar moves up the scale of inconvenience before it becomes morally problematic.
But you have arrogated to yourself the sole ability to judge that point. Whenever I ask you for a specific proposal – that doesn’t involve your fiat announcement – you have none.
Except that most people don’t agree that this is what’s happening.
Cite?
I deny that claim.
Well, I guess I’m free to say anything I like about Bricker with no fear of contradiction - by him, anyway.
I suppose it could be said he’s willing to be ignorant of math in service of what he perceives as higher goals; the ability of a legislature to pass whatever laws it likes and that legislature having improved chances of being dominated by Republicans.
So what’s your proposal?
You correctly point out that majority support has existed in the past for things we now agree were immoral. That’s absolutely true.
So what method do you propose we use to craft laws?
I propose this particular issue, electorate management, not be in the hands of elected officials.
Oh, I already did.
Oh, so, now we are heading off into the wilds of legislative theory? What a fascinating diversion that might be, with the extra added advantage of drawing attention away from the debate you have so profoundly lost.
There is no “valid neutral justification” in any of this. Like Gibbon’s famous line about the Holy Roman Empire, it is neither valid, nor neutral, nor justified. There is no crisis in voter confidence to be addressed, save for such people who believe it. It is essentially faith-based, a vagrant opinion without visible means of support.
Why would I believe that you can justify an unjust law simply to assuage the fears of people who are ill-informed? You are compelled to construct absurd mathematical phantasms of ultra super-dooper close elections, and when confronted with a real-life example of a super dooper close election that doesn’t fit your case, you brush it aside, doesn’t fit, therefore, it doesn’t count.
Then you offer us Georgia, to claim that this one example proves that your rhetorical opponents are all a bunch of hysterically paranoid nellies. I would be pleased to believe that you are ashamed of such a grossly repulsive tactic. Like I would be pleased to believe that you are embarrassed to have offered an anecdote about CASA volunteers subverting and corrupting our electoral system. We are to accept that as truth, based on nothing more than your spotless reputation for candor and honesty?
If any of your opponents had offered such anecdotal evidence, I have every confidence you would have been quick to derision and mockery.
You are a smart man, Counselor, a fact you are at great pains to emphasize. I have no doubt that if you had a better case, you would have offered it. You don’t, so you didn’t. I remind you that intelligence is a characteristic, not a virtue. Many people who lack your gifts work hard to promote justice and equality, they could use the help of a sharpy like yourself.
That is, if you’ve got nothing better to do.
No. What system do you propose?
You reject the current one. There are howls of outrage when I point out you seem to want to be King. So what system are you saying we need to put in place?
You say so. I disagree.
You are unmoved by the fact that the Supreme Court also disagrees – and of course it was from the Supreme Court that I took the phrase “valid, neutral justification.”
So the Supreme Court isn’t the authority to decide the issue. The legislature isn’t. The governor isn’t.
Who is?