True.
And I’d like to see that.
Unfortunately, such proposals are scuttled by the Republicans. And the Democrats.
Unless it’s the freedom to end an unwanted pregnancy.
You’re not about freedom Bricktop, you’re about social Darwinism. You have the delusion of your own superiority, so you want other, less able people to fail.
You have an ID, so everyone who doesn’t have one is lazy, fuck 'em. You don’t want them to have freedom to achieve, you want them to have the freedom to fail and suffer for what you imagine their bad decisions are.
“So, a 17 year old is pregnant? She should have kept her damn legs shut. Raise that baby, take your medicine you failure. Bricker is better than youuuuuuuuuu!!!11” — *Bricker, Compassionate Conservative
*
Truly, an education in the dark and turgid currents in the Counselor’s mind.
“Voter confidence” is very real, it is indeed crucial to the well being of the Republic. So, Republican voters who fret and wring their hands over the terrifying prospect of illegal voters negating and diluting the impact of their votes, that is very important, very significant. Despite the fact that by any known measure, the reality of such illegal voting cannot be proven to have any actual impact.
However, if the Republican Party sets out to maliciously rig the game by harassing and hindering the voting access of the brown and unworthy citizen, his concerns can be dismissed. It is merely “disparate impact”, which is “not always impermissible”, so the effect of these laws on the brown and unworthy are “negligible”. No need to trouble ourselves about them, they don’t count.
Of course,* they* might think that their voting access rights are important and worthy of protection, they might imagine that those rights are equally important, if not more so, than “voter confidence”. They are wrong,* their* concerns are “negligible”. We can simply brush them aside, they are of no importance.
And lest we imagine that all of this is the product of a biased mind: we are wrong. The Counselor has unearthed a post from years past, in which he forthrightly and firmly declares that he is the epitome and paragon of unbiased and nonpartisan thinking. We can rely on this testimony because it comes from a source that is unbiased and nonpartisan. So that settles* that!*
And the punch line? He’s not kidding.
Those quote marks you’re using – do they indicate that I said that somewhere, or are they intended to fabricate dialogue that I never used?
If they think that, I guess they should vote.
But no one who thinks that doesn’t vote.
The post you lied about searching for? That one?
The post that I “unearthed” after you claimed that I never condemned Republicans at the time I condemned the Massachusetts Democratic expedient law switcherooni?
The post that you were confident didn’t exist, so much so that you dishonestly fabricated a claim that you searched for it, and when called on it, didn’t have the guts to simply admit that you lied, and instead tried to lamely blame a lack of search engine power?
The depths of your utter dishonesty are astonishing.
I’m sure Lobohan stands by his paraphrase.
Quote marks are used to indicate paraphrases now, are they?
Well, I guess there’s no such thing as paraphrase marks.
Well, the Democrats proposed the creation of paraphrase marks, but the Republicans filibustered it.
Good guess, I quite agree, they should vote. Even if… especially if!.. they are aware that efforts are being made to prevent them. There is a long-standing tradition of Americans asserting their voting rights against daunting and ruthless oppression. i heartily approved then, and still do.
Wait, what? Da fuq? What do you even mean “no one who thinks that doesn’t vote”? If it means that everyone who thinks that does vote, wouldn’t it have been simpler and clearer to say so? And if that’s not what it means, da fuq does it mean?!
And from whence, this stunning nugget of information? Sez who?
A moment of the reader’s patience. Bricker, you are excused, this need not concern you, you may take a break and pursue your hobby of snaring butterflies and feeding them to spiders…
Upthread, I made a joke about “searching” for instances of** Bricker** slinging “liberal hypocrisy” about like the #10 Hammer of Thor. I relied on the computer savvy of the Board, that anyone who knows that DOS doesn’t mean the Spanish word for “two” would see the humor of absurdity, that searching “Bricker” and “liberal hypocrisy” would make no more sense than searching for the middle C note in piano sheet music. You would be asking for everything from Mozart to Jerry Lee Lewis.
Nonetheless, it might well be proper to apologize to anyone I inadvertently misled. Be assured, I am not so stupid as to “search” for instances of “Bricker” and “liberal hypocrisy”, my son would be very cross with me if our 'puter melted into a despairing puddle.
I might even extend that apology to Bricker if i honestly believed he were that stupid and humorless. But stupid, no, he is perfectly capable of creating complex rationales to justify the patently absurd. As for humorless, well, his most recent sig line is a snapper!
We’ve wandered off into a tangent here, clearly… I agree that the legislature debating the bill is at least somewhat analogous to what we’re doing here. That said, I suspect that an enormous percentage of the time, legislators vote based on something OTHER than who convinced who of what during floor debates. And, for that matter, I’m sure that floor debates are largely political theater as opposed to actual attempts to persuade, etc. Certainly the whole idea of “ok, well, I’ll pass this voter ID law if you pass my clean water act” or something like that is fairly impossible on a message board. What am I going to do, agree that you win this debate if you agree that I win a different debate?
We’ve gone over this before. But it’s easy to take this idea WAY too far. How much weight should “well, it’s always been that way” be given in, say, a debate about gay marriage?
I disagree. It’s possible to hold positions that well reasoned and honestly held and can be logically defended which do NOT either come down to thumb up or thumb down on a particular law or policy. If there were a particular gun control law proposed that was kind of right on the line of where I think the laws should be, I might not feel like I could meaningfully come down either for or against that law. And because I’m not a legislator, I have no responsibility to do so. That wouldn’t prevent me from joining in a debate about such a law, as I might learn something from the arguments either side put forth, and I might be able to add some interesting insights and thoughts. All of which is to say that if part of the reason you support these voter ID laws is because, well, you don’t OPPOSE them, and you HAVE to do one or the other… well, no you don’t. In fact, it ought to be fairly easy to come up with a context for a similar (but hypothetical) law in which you said “well, huh, I can see arguments both for and against that”. Nothing wrong with that.
I don’t think that’s a particularly reasonable comparison. It’s certainly not the case that every single member of the board has an individual responsibility to point out every error they ever see, etc. If nothing else, if we did, this would be a MISERABLE place to post. That’s a very different kettle of fish from someone who has a posting style or habit which has as a very predictable result the derailing of entire threads, which I claim describes your policy of (slight exaggeration here) “I don’t accept anything you say as meaningful until and unless you demonstrate to my satisfaction that you have a history of being evenhanded and unbiased on this issue”.
I think that depends on the context. If someone says something factual, like, “no democrats have ever engaged in gerrymandering”, then it is entirely reasonable to correct them. But there’s a wide spectrum of remarks from that to something like “all those Republicans are unethical jerks”, on which you implicitly tack “and Democrats aren’t”. When (a) the claim wasn’t really made in the first place, and (b) “unethical jerks” is hardly a well defined concept in the first place. Responding to “all those Republicans are unethical jerks” with “wait, are you saying that Democrats AREN’T unethical jerks”, PARTICULARLY in a situation like this when you seem to actually accept that the Republicans in question WERE unethical jerks; that’s just a near-guarantee of a trainwreck of a thread. And, honestly, that’s happened so often that it’s hard not to think that that’s at least partially intentional. You’re too smart NOT to know that that kind of response just leads to name-calling.
Good question, and the clear answer is that I wasn’t paying enough attention at the time to be aware of the larger context. I actually voted for that proposition, but had completely forgotten it WAS even a proposition until you reminded me.
That said, there’s an interesting issue there about laying down ones arms in the middle of a gun fight. I would rather have had the proposition say something like “we will adopt fair districting… but 12 years from now if sufficient other Republican-leaning states have NOT also adopted fair districting we’ll go back to gerrymandering”. I firmly believe that gerrymandering is terrible and antidemocratic. But the largest blue state in the nation unilaterally getting rid of it doesn’t actually fix anything in national elections unless it starts a trend. It’s like the proposals for states to start dividing electoral votes rather than being winner-take-all. I think that’s a great idea, from a will-of-the-people standpoint. But who’s going to go first? If California just does it, that just hands the presidency to the Republicans for a generation.
True. I’ve been wanting to start a thread along the lines of “I and many of my liberal brethren take is pretty much for granted that the current generation of Republicans are unusually unethical. How can we objectively test the truth of that proposition”. I don’t think it’s necessarily IMPOSSIBLE. For instance, the time with the big fight about the debt-ceiling increase is at least arguably a case of Republicans doing something that had never before been done, something that had grave risk of damaging the nation, purely to win a political fight. That’s the type of thing which could be part of an argument to provide more evidence for such a claim than just “he said, she said”.
But by that argument, all groups of people throughout history were always equally good or evil. It’s entirely possible for various circumstances to shape particular groups of people at particular times in ways that shape their behavior. For instance, off the top of my head, the Republican party currently has a very closeknit relationship with Fox News, and there is no analogous organization on the left. Now, that’s not obviously immediately good or evil, but it’s certainly DIFFERENT, and it could well be different enough to affect overall levels of ethics. Another argument one might make about this type of issue is that it’s not self-correcting. That is, if a party starts to drift a little bit over onto the unethical side, then instead of the pendulum swinging back a few years later, instead they attract a new generation of unethical people, etc., and things snowball.
(Again, I’m not at this point trying to prove anything, I’m just disputing your point that since human nature is somewhat constant, there will generally be equal amounts of unethical behavior on both sides.)
I don’t see your analogy at all. It’s more like if I said “here are two posters who are ASSHOLES”. Does that imply that every other poster is NOT an asshole?
I would need you to be more explicit before I could make any sort of judgement. As well, there are any number of us who have spasms of rectalism, its a human hazard. Why that is somehow the bass line for some people but not for others is the riddle of the sphincter.
Like a predictable train schedule, we now learn that this was all a joke.
Of course it was.
So tell me – the first lie, about doing a search – that was ALSO a joke?
And then we pressed, rather than explaining it was a joke, you stayed “in character” and essayed ANOTHER joke, that your search was real and it used ‘Bricker’ and ‘liberal hypocriscy’ as search terms?
And then on being pressed on that announcement, you again didn’t explain it, but doubled down again on your keen humorous instincts and said that there was no search using that term because, according to you, the server couldn’t handle the load. (That statement, at least, on it’s own is at least recognizeable as humor.)
But that whole series was just a string of jokes, huh?
I love how this thread has devolved into Bricker blowing tearful snot-bubbles while sobbing about how oppressed he is.
He’s advocating making it harder for poor people to vote, and has hissy, vaginal breakdowns because he keeps losing the argument.
Boo-fucking-hoo you silly bitch.
You keep announcing I’ve lost. Who are you trying to convince?
Uh, you?
Some people create wealth, others accumulate it. You might familiarize yourself with the difference between indefinite and infinite.
That’s a very biblical synopsis of the process.
Which is why in order to allow some people to feel more free about their vote, you support the idea of burdening others with the result of them feeling less free about theirs.
Didn’t that genetic transition happen, like, 3000 posts ago? It’s like you’re suddenly noticing that dinosaurs aren’t around.
The latter feeling is not one that society is prepared to recognize as reasonable.
Certainly settles that issue! What kind of weirdo goes around criticizing society?