That’s true, in the sense that stockbrokers are legally encouraged to highlight the fact that they are not promising future success.
It does not follow, however, that past performance is utterly irrelevant in determining the viability of future success.
In your case, your past dismal failures of prediction don’t seem to hinder your current crop of predictions, and when those fail, undoubtedly you’ll simply manufacture another excuse and begin making confident predictions about the 2018 midterms.
Perhaps I’m not clear on what makes someone a “bad citizen,” which is your phrase. I assumed that meant something more than voting for public policies you consider unwise.
In any event, it doesn’t really matter to my point, which is this: this is fundamentally about weighing different consequences of having and not having Voter ID, and I have a hard time empathizing with those who think keeping out a small number of non-citizen votes is a policy goal that is so desirable that it merits making it harder (and in a few cases, impossible) for poor and old people to vote. And one reason for why I don’t understand people who weigh the outcomes that way is that I would expect that preventing non-citizens from voting would be regarded as a fairly minor goal, given how unimportant it has been in the history of our country and how, at many different times and places, a majority have believed that allowing non-citizens to vote is actively a good idea.
This last round of posts has gone a long way toward cementing my opinion of Bricker as the single most dishonest person I have ever encountered in print.
It’s my phrase in the sense that I used it – to reply to Bryan Ekers, who used it to describe me:
In my opinion, then, a more fair commentary would be that it’s his phrase.
It is puzzling how he uses it, I respond to it, and it becomes mine.Is this one of of those, “I don’t care what other idiocies people on my side do; I’m here to attack you,” moments?
I think this summary vastly overstates the public support for the concept.
Agreed. Without the final clause, your interpretation would certainly be correct. And it is a clause, a dependent clause, inasmuch as it cannot stand on its own as a sentence given the presence of a subordinate conjunction, but has both a noun as a subject and a verb describing the actions of the subject noun. This stands in contrast to a phrase, which may have verbs and/or nouns but lacks the structure of a subject noun and a verb “doing,” that subject.
Incidentally, I consider Bricker to be a bad citizen of his country based on his support for the curtailing of the rights of some of his fellow citizens whIle claiming it is for the greater good of his country when that is an obvious lie he can only sustain by willful blindness.
You assholes follow party blindly. If Voter ID helped Democrats, you’d be all for it.
I am driven by application of unchanging principles to the facts. I’m defending Hillary Clinton in GD right now, because the attacks on her are dishonest and unfounded.
I’m sure you recognize, intellectually, that many of us (and maybe nearly all of us) actually oppose these Voter ID requirements because we really do equate them to past voter suppression.
And per my past pledge, I’ll amend that I don’t believe Bricker is necessarily a bad citizen for beliefs (which don’t include anything that qualify as automatic “bad citizen” signifiers, at least to me) he posts about on the internet. He’s just stubborn and biased, and may not recognize the depth of his stubbornness and bias… but these are hardly uncommon flaws (and flaws that I probably share to some degree or other).
Of course I recognize that. My comment was certainly not directed at you. You’re an “asshole” or a “pustule,” are you?
No, my comment was directed at that subset of you who blindly predict Democratic wins in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and those of you who oppose Voter ID because it hurts your party’s chances.
Why would it matter that he used it first, as opposed to you introducing it, as it relates to our discussion? I genuinely don’t get what you think you’ve “Gotcha’d” here. My point in referring to it as your words is that it made more sense for you to clarify what you meant than for me to guess.
Since the quoted paragraph says nothing about public support for the concept, it’s hard to see how it could overstate it. My guess is that fewer than 20% of Americans would support non-citizen voting today. I don’t see why that’s relevant at all.
I meant to simply reflect the phrase back at Bryan – to highlight its lack of precision by showing that it can be wielded by me to describe him in just as valid a fashion as it was by him to describe me.
It said, “And one reason for why I don’t understand people who weigh the outcomes that way is that I would expect that preventing non-citizens from voting would be regarded as a fairly minor goal, given how unimportant it has been in the history of our country and how, at many different times and places, a majority have believed that allowing non-citizens to vote is actively a good idea.”
You don’t think the tone of that suggests public support?
Huh? Doesn’t it pretty obviously suggest that I think the public is in favor of disenfranchising non-citizens? That’s why I wrote, “I would expect that preventing non-citizens from voting would be regarded as a fairly minor goal.”
Not sure there’s much more fruitful to wring from this. But just in case: again my point is that I am surprised that anyone would weigh the harm of allowing a small number of non-citizens to vote as being more important than the harm of putting up obstacles for the poor and old to vote. I’m not doubting your sincerity in weighing the harms that way, or that some of the people who support voter ID are also making that same judgment. I’m just saying I find it hard to understand, given our country’s history.
Doesn’t have to. There’s all kinds of ways to get voter ID into people’s hands without problems or hindrances. If that were the purpose, the Republicans would have done it. They didn’t do it because they didn’t want to, because stacking the electoral deck is the whole point of the exercise.
You have already stipulated that “some” Republicans had malign motives. Rather a coy word, “some”. What does it mean? That a few sneaky and underhanded Republicans hoodwinked their virtuous fellows into approving a sordid and repugnant program? Can you offer us any reason to believe that? Have those gullible souls recanted their approval and made moves to correct the problem? Not that I’ve heard, perhaps you can point them out to us?
And just to reiterate, for the one hundred fifteenth time: nothing wrong with voter ID just as itself. What’s wrong is using that legitimacy as leverage to an illegitimate purpose. You can defend the validity of voter ID until you’re blue in the face, and it has nothing to do with the issue.