“allowed people to vote by showing a picture ID”? In my precinct, until this new law you just had to flash your Voters’ Registration. Then sign the voter roll. No ID needed at all. Maybe they’ve always been more suspicious in your neighborhood.
This year I accept the County Clerk’s offer of a ballot to mail in. No photo ID at all was needed. Because they figure folks in my age group all vote Republican. heh…
The Voter ID thing sucks, but our major problem was the low turnout. Once more Texans get out to vote, things will change. Can’t be too soon for me.
You’re overstating your uniqueness and understating the extent to which I engage liberals.
You may find great joy in arguing with BobLibDem or Lobohan. I do not. I just don’t give a shit about garden variety hyperpartisanship or ignorance. Is that because I’m partisan? It could be, but I don’t think so. I also don’t generally engage with Clothahump.
What interests me–or at least one of the reasons I post here–is to test ideas. So I’m far more likely to engage someone who I know disagrees with me on the actual underlying issue, and who I think is capable of honest, intellectual dialogue. And, contraHamlet, I think you generally fit that bill. I do engage with liberals when I think we genuinely disagree, and I think they are worth arguing with. I have at least one active thread right now in which I’m doing so, and have been involved in many others.
OK, fair enough. Then can I ask that this particular thread be excluded from the list of those that contain “honest, intellectual dialogue?”
I will happily engage in same with you in other threads. Here, I refuse to allow my opponents to say any damn thing that flits through what passes for their minds while being limited to reasoned debate in my own posting.
No you live in a bubble where low-information dupes like you end up voting for retards like Louie Gohmert. Just dupe being manipulated by people who think winning because they can deceive people like you isn’t trashy.
Think hard about this your crusty old twat, you have an ID in your pocket.
Hundreds of thousands of Texicans don’t. So telling them to get it in order to vote, makes it harder for them. So equating fishing it out of your pocket, is particularly stupid. You’re angry and bitter, and you think greedy people are stealing from you, I get it. You think your “way of life” is under attack. I get it.
Rage isn’t thought. And sublimating reality to the stories you hear from RW media is no way to live a life. You’ll die believing a bunch of nonsense, and having lived your life needlessly cruel and upset, all because your angry vote is worth something to people who wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire.
Pardon, before the put the last nail in your cross, if I might remind you, you openly lied about my position on the Mass legislature flipping who appoints replacement Senators, and did it brazenly in several threads.
You’re dishonest. So let’s just get that out there. You also open lied saying I didn’t understand your viewpoint, when you admitted in writing that I did actually understand your viewpoint.
Again, dishonest.
Also, your arguments in this thread have failed utterly, and when shown that you change the subject, or just run away from the thread for a few days like a pussy.
You aren’t fighting the good fight, or testing your ideas against liberals. You’re attempting to cloud the issue or outright lie to keep from admitting your failure. You’re the opposite of what Richard Parker is talking about.
If you cared about testing your ideas, you’d have changed your position on this issue, because it’s been shown to you a great many times that your position is advocating causing more damage than the problem you’re trying to fix.
I think I’ve finally given up on thinking that Bricker is arguing in good faith in this thread… a position that many of my fellow liberals have been urging me to adopt for ages but which I’ve stubbornly rejected until now.
Three things tipped the scales for me:
(1) The ridiculous bullshit about liberals wanting to rule by fiat… as if Bricker is too stupid to understand what expressing an opinion on a message board in non-precise English actually means. Was he honestly confused? Or was he just trying to obfuscate the issue? (My theory: he’s a lawyer, he likes winning arguments, so he adopts whatever tactic he thinks will allow him to “win”. Not really trolling, not really dishonest per se, but certainly not actually debating in good faith.)
(2) The fact that while he has acknowledged that I’ve argued with him generally honestly, and in fact has singled me out as someone who actually has understood his positions and so forth (whee!), he repeatedly ignores my generally-polite and generally-substantive (if lengthy) posts. This has happened over and over again of late, most recently #7293
(3) In one of the election-night threads, he made a remark like “and amazingly, black voting in Georgia went up, even though we know that it’s axiomatically the case that voter ID laws reduce minority vote”. Which is (a) totally illogical from a purely mathematical standpoint, and (b) a blatant misrepresentation of the general liberal position in this thread, as has been expressed many many times. A voter ID law, if properly implemented, would not necessarily have a disenfranchising effect at all, what we’re worried about is voter ID laws that are hurriedly implemented without sufficient safeguards to make it easy for everyone to get a valid ID.
So… I’m done defending Bricker. I might still engage with him because, hey, it’s fun. But I think his actions in this thread are an embarrassment.
That’s fine, Max, because I’ve gotten pretty irritated seeing your byline lately. You do post in good faith, but you don’t demand it of your fellow liberals. You have no problem calling me out for embarrassing posts, and no problem making this “more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger” announcement of yours, but you’re happy to stand by and watch the bullshit tactics from the moron squad with nary a peep. Yes, you’ve explained your reticence, and yes, I’m still sick of it.
You can assume that I’ve gone native. I’m a convert to the Lobohan and elucidator brand of horseshit, OK?
Are you of the mind that no one on these boards arguing against Voter ID laws has expressed the sentiment that they are against them—period!? I don’t think that is the case at all.
And Bricker makes a very good point about you lack of even-handedness here. While we often disagree, I do think you’re one of the better posters on the board, and I enjoy both your posts and how you approach the debate. But you getting in a huff over this seems like small ball. You seem to want Bricker to ignore the massive stupidity of posts by Elucidator, Lobohan, etc., as if their opinions are not part of the debate. Plus, this is the Pit. Why is it incumbent upon him to subject himself from the constant palisade of stupidity and nincompoopery without bitch-slapping someone from time to time.
Sounds like you’d be happier having the debate with Bricker in GD, where the requirements are less suited to the “skills” (:dubious:) of the nitwits.
[ol]
[li]“Would you rather have Rick Scott in Florida overseeing the voting mechanism, or Charlie Crist? Would you rather have Scott Walker in Wisconsin overseeing the voting mechanism, or would you rather have Mary Burke? Who would you rather have in Ohio, John Kasich or Ed FitzGerald?” ~ Chris Christie (Blowhard-NJ)[/li]
[li]“Same-day registration all of a sudden this year comes to Illinois. Shocking. It’s shocking. I’m sure it was all based on public policy, good public policy, to get same-day registration here in Illinois just this year, when the governor is in the toilet and needs as much help as he can get.” … [Same-day registration] is designed to be a major “obstacle” for the GOP’s gubernatorial candidates. ~ Chris Christie (Piece of shit-His own ass)[/li]
[li]“[T]his location is dominated by African-American shoppers and it is near several large African-American mega churches such as New Birth Missionary Baptist… Is it possible church buses will be used to transport people directly to the mall since the poll will open when the mall opens? If this happens, so much for the accepted principle of separation of church and state.” ~ Senator Fran Millar (Racist-Georgia)[/li]
[li]“I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban — read African-American — voter-turnout machine.” (And yes, he actually said “read African-American,” that wasn’t inserted.) ~ Ohio GOP chair and douche bag, Doug Preis[/li]
[li]“DOJ’s accusations of racial discrimination are baseless. In 2011, both houses of the Texas Legislature were controlled by large Republican majorities, and their redistricting decisions were designed to increase the Republican Party’s electoral prospects at the expense of the Democrats. It is perfectly constitutional for a Republican-controlled legislature to make partisan districting decisions, even if there are incidental effects on minority voters who support Democratic candidates.” ~ Greg Abbott (Blatant Partisan Shit Stain-Texas)[/li]
[li]“I’ve had some radical ideas about voting and it’s probably not a good time to tell them, but you used to have to be a property owner to vote.” ~ Ted Yoho (Yahoo-Florida)[/li][/ol]
I think very few if any people have said that a country in which there are no voter ID laws is better than a country with voter ID laws, period paragraph end of story absoluteness. No one has said “hey, you know how in Germany there’s a free national ID card that everyone has, and you have to use it to vote? Well, they should change their laws so that they are NOT required to show that ID card in order to vote”.
I don’t know whether you can find one or two examples of people actually opposing voter ID laws in any circumstances ever, and if you do I suspect they are probably someone engaging in hyperbole or just phrasing their opinion carelessly. But even if there ARE a few people expressing that absolute position, that’s clearly quite far from the “consensus” liberal opinion in this thread. And while there is not a liberal hive mind on the SDMB, there is (in my opinion) a fairly consistent opinion held by a good many of the active posters in this thread. To mockingly respond to an opinion held by a tiny fraction of the posters in this thread as if that’s somehow scoring points is disingenuous at best.
Appreciated
When have I ever said it was? I’ve never (ok, possibly once or twice, but basically never) stepped in when someone called Bricker a poopyhead and he called them a smellyface and scolded him for name calling. My “scolding” of Bricker has never been a request that he turn the other cheek, except to the extent that the mud-slinging prevents him from actually responding to the substantive points in the debate.
Yes, it’s true that I’m more likely to call out a logical fallacy in one of Bricker’s posts than in one of the zillions of posts from people on my side of the argument. And, well, that’s just how it is. From my (by definition self-centered) view of this thread, I’m arguing with Bricker, so I carefully read and scrutinize his posts, and respond to them when I see fit. I do that much less often for posters other than Bricker. And I acknowledge that that can lead to situations in which a side tangent between Bricker and someone else has gotten into borderline-name-calling and someone makes an outrageous statement and someone responds, and I call Bricker on it because his are the posts that I read with the most interest.
In a practical sense, it’s hard to see a way around that without getting more conservatives on the board. I’m just one person, and a moderately lazy one.
Well, you’ve said on many occasions that your purpose in posting in threads like this one is to attempt to impress and convert hypothetical undecideds, and that leaving random insults and illogical attacks unchallenged gives them an imprimateur of authority. I guess that depends whether these undecided people are thoughtful observers or just casual readers. Maybe casual readers will be impressed by random low-level points-scoring. But a more thoughtful undecided will be capable on his own of dismissing random crap, and will be far more interested in substantial and thoughtful debate.
If you start ignoring someone, that doesn’t mean that they win!
A quotation also known as the Liberal Creed. Your contempt for the voters too stupid to know what’s good for them is legendary. Why the morons don’t keep voting for Democrats is beyond you!