I read it. The link was there to contextualize the quote. It wasn't supposed to be my opinion on the matter, I actually haven't really given my opinion on this. I put it up for discussion.
Election results discussion thread (and sadly the inevitable aftermath)
- Thread starter Godzillarich(aka tf2godz)
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Poor people instrinsically tend to live more outside the system.
People who can't afford to go abroad tend not to have passports. People who can't afford a car tend not to have a driving licence. People who get paid cash in hand are less likely to have bank accounts. Where a place of residence is important for identification, the homeless are screwed and renters (often with short tenancies) are more likely to have problems. People who work all hours of the day to make ends meet and/or have childcare have less time to deal with admin. Many people who are poor are so because they are troubled or chaotic, so don't organise so well.
It's a bit like the states clamping down on abortion. They can't ban it, but they can make it sufficiently inconvenient to get one that inevitably some people (poor people) can't or won't. That's why they do it.
Man, when GOP legislatures ask for voting data and methods sorted by race, then start eliminating options and methods favored by black people, that's racist.
Which is a thing that happened in Texas(?), and why they lost in the courts over restricting early voting and requiring specific IDs. Can't find the specific case I'm thinking of because the GOP pushes hard on this bullshit. Imagine allowing Concealed Carry IDs to count for voting, but not State Employment IDs
And again: it's theoretically, in their own words designed to stop a problem that doesn't exist on any meaningful level. Even if we take the GOP at its most charitable, the party of smaller government is adding expense and inconvenience and bureaucracy to useless laws that don't matter or solve any problem
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lel and you were annoyed with people misinterpreting your ideology, have some respect for your opposition.
I don't think you need a passport, a driver's license, or a bank account to get a valid photo ID. Yes, the homeless are screwed, but for everyone else who has a place of residence, I don't think they lack the required paperwork. If it's just because they're too busy with multiple jobs and kids, then okay, I can see that.
To me, it's silly, voting is supposed to be "the most important thing", but it's not treated as such. The power is given, but there's no responsibility to go along with it.
Compare it to being a Presidential nominee. You have to fill out a lot of paperwork that even Kanye's team couldn't do. You have to jump through hoops. The responsibility you need to meet in order to win the presidency in proportional to the power you'd gain if you were to win. It's important, so you need to demonstrate that you're serious about it.
As per another thread ongoing in the forums, I think people feel very disconnected from politics, not least because they don't feel what they vote changes anything. This is both that the political system fails to deliver, and the sense of why one vote in millions makes any difference. And it's simply a long way in importance behind day to day concerns like feeding oneself and paying the bills. Thus it's easy for many to disengage, and hard to convince them it's important.
Kanye is perhaps exactly the example of how a chaotic, disorganised and abitrary individual can struggle to get things done, even despite his team. Imagine a Kanye without a team, or the money: there are plenty of them out there. Yet they still have the same right to vote as anyone else.
Maybe giving everybody the right to vote was a mistake. Certainly people are saying that Trump should have never been elected President for the past 4 years, so I'm not alone in this, right?
A government always represents who gives it power, and hands the benefits of society primarily to those who give it power. If people are not represented, they will be cut out, their situation will get worse, and it will probably end in riots (like, a whole lot more than now) and even rebellion. That, really, is the essence of democracy. There will inevitably be hell to pay if the people are unhappy, so a system that is designed to inherently pay more attention to the people should be less likely to implode.
I think democracy needs to be looked after and carefully tended. I don't think politicians and other elites have looked after it, and the attitudes that led to Trump are the result. Trump was the result of a failure of the political classes and socioeconomic elites. It only remains to be seen whether the Trump experience motivates them to do something about it. The problem is that Trump made insanity the party line and they let him do it. Can they reclaim their party from him?
I fear not, because outside the president, the US system lacks leaders. Leadership devolves to people like McConnell and Pelosi, who are fixers, really. They don't have a vision, they don't want to improve things, they just play the system to benefit themselves and their parties in a very narrow way. They must be pushed into changing things or replaced, and I don't know who will do that.
So what you're saying is that if tstorm likes Voter ID laws so much, why doesn't he move to Venezuela?
He'll also benefit greatly from the Maduro diet there! He could lose so much weight!
Yes, we have voter ID.
We also have nationally issued mandatory IDs for every adult and adolescent citicen.
Voter suppression has never been a topic.
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Trump campaign abandons part of legal challenge to Pennsylvania election results
Allegation that 682,479 mail-in and absentee ballots were illegally processed without its representatives watching has been dropped
www.theguardian.com
Trump has officially dropped the allegation that PA mail-in ballots were counted without poll-watchers present. The only claim remaining of the PA lawsuit is that blue counties were allowed to "cure" in advance and red counties weren't.
There's so much to unpack from this passage, from (what remains of) Trump's lawsuit.Trump's lawsui said:
Firstly, if "following the law" results in "disenfranchising many", then you've got a fucking problem.
Secondly, there's nothing in PA law that excludes a notice-and-cure process. Its perfectly legal to begin with.
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"Small government conservatism" isn't traditional the way you're imagining it. The "all government spending is bad at every level" is a rather new libertarian phenomenon that I personally hope fades away. The Republican conservative perspective has always been about specifically minimizing the broader government, doing all things as locally as feasible. Don't have the federal government do what the states can, don't have the states do what a locality can, don't have localities do what the family can. States run their own elections, they should be able to spend money on them, it's their responsibility.
To go on one of my tangents, the phrase "states rights" should have died with the Dixiecrats, and that's one of my criticisms of Republicans these days. We don't care about states' rights, we care about states' responsibilities. It's not a right to do something like educate children, it's a responsibility.
...Don't have the family do what the person can, don't have the person do what the organ can, don't have the organ do what the microbial bacterium can. I finally get it!
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