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Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? Bernie Sanders wants to know who owns America?

#18901 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2021-October-02, 14:21

View Posthrothgar, on 2021-October-02, 04:56, said:

Aw, the racist troll wants to disenfranchise blacks AND pass new laws making it easier to reject the voters’ will by removing or neutralizing officials who could stand in the way of a naked power grab -- like his own states's secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger -- AND have the rest of us respect his opinions...

fyp
If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
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#18902 User is offline   Chas_P 

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Posted 2021-October-02, 19:34

View Postawm, on 2021-October-02, 00:32, said:

The problem with this attitude is holding it in combination with wanting strict voter ID. Most countries in Europe have a voter ID requirement, but they also have national ID cards that are routinely issued (for free) to all citizens. The standard form of identification in the US is the driver's license, but there are plenty of (mostly poorer, mostly city-dwelling) Americans who don't have one, and obtaining one actually requires a significant investment of time and money (in addition to the fees for the license itself, you need to pass a test which probably requires taking a course which also costs money, and you need to have a car at least on the day of the exam). It's a hefty cost for a low-income person who plans never to drive (and one which people with significant health issues may simply not be able to pass). Of course, the courts have ruled that states demanding identification to vote must supply a free identification for valid voters (otherwise it becomes a poll tax), but in practice getting one of these ID cards can also be quite difficult, requiring lots of phone calls to verify availability, obtaining transportation to a relatively distant issuing location, and waiting there for a significant length of time during a business day. These are all significant obstacles to a low-income working or disabled person.

I don't know about the other 49 states, but in Georgia....
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#18903 User is offline   Chas_P 

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Posted 2021-October-02, 19:37

View Posthrothgar, on 2021-October-02, 04:56, said:

Aw, the racist wants to disenfranchise blacks AND have the rest of us respect his opinions...

LMAO@you. Go fry up some brussels sprouts in duck fat and bask in your glory.
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#18904 User is offline   Gilithin 

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Posted 2021-October-02, 22:47

View PostChas_P, on 2021-October-02, 19:34, said:

I don't know about the other 49 states, but in Georgia....

You might find it helpful to read that 80% of Georgia voters blocked by the state’s “exact match” voter registration law were people of color in 2018 and much much more.
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#18905 User is offline   hrothgar 

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Posted 2021-October-03, 08:54

View PostGilithin, on 2021-October-02, 22:47, said:



Note to mention the fact that People of Color are much much less likely to have driver's licenses or other forms of ID
Alderaan delenda est
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#18906 User is offline   hrothgar 

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Posted 2021-October-03, 08:55

View PostChas_P, on 2021-October-02, 19:37, said:

LMAO@you. Go fry up some brussels sprouts in duck fat and bask in your glory.


Aw, looks like we hit a nerve

Poor little Chas doesn't like people pointing out that he's a racist.

Someday soon, he'll be dead.
And the world and the forums will be a much much better place.
Alderaan delenda est
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#18907 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2021-October-03, 11:51

Ross Douthat said:

There is a certain pall over American liberalism as the negotiations over the infrastructure and reconciliation bills drag on — a feeling that even if a deal is negotiated (as I assume one will be), it will represent a last gasp for progressive policymaking, a final desperate advance before the American system’s rightward tilt restores Republican power or else a constitutional crisis hits.

I did my part to contribute to this pessimism with last weekend’s column, suggesting ways that Joe Biden could lose re-election to Donald Trump outright in 2024. But now I’m here as an agent of good cheer, asking liberals to step back, take a longer view and recognize everything they’ve won.

Seen from this perspective, the multi-trillion-dollar legislative package that the Democrats are considering is the culmination of a roughly two-decade process in which American policymaking and culture have shifted substantially leftward — shaped by changes that liberals circa 2003 desperately wanted to see happen — while what once seemed like powerful right-of-center ideologies have gone down to defeat.

Since we take these defeats for granted it’s worth enumerating them. Liberals in 2003 faced, first, George W. Bush’s ideology of hawkish interventionism, which was widely expected to dominate foreign policy debates for a generation, with Democrats adapting rather than opposing it directly.

Five years later the Democrats would nominate an Iraq War opponent named Barack Hussein Obama and win decisively. By 2016, Bushism would be essentially repudiated in the Republican Party by Donald Trump. Today the vestiges of early-2000s hawkishness survive in establishment opposition to Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal, but dovishness is often a political asset rather than a liability, and the post-911 vision of a G.O.P. running against weak-on-terror Democrats long ago dissolved.

So has the Bush-era vision of a G.O.P. rallying so-called values voters, a Christian and churchgoing voting bloc, against secularism, sexual liberation and same-sex marriage. The “Jesusland” that showed up in liberal memes after the 2004 election has been shrinking ever since, and socially liberal values have advanced on a wide range of issues. A world where Republicans could run a national campaign promising to maintain marriage as a heterosexual institution has given way to a world where Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices lock in transgender rights and about one in six adult Americans in Generation Z self-identify as outside heterosexuality (even if, one supposes, some of them still practice it).

Finally, progressivism has triumphed over the conservative ideology of welfare-state retrenchment, embodied by Bush’s push for Social Security private accounts and, in a more dramatic way, by Tea Party deficit panic and Paul Ryan’s big plans for Medicare and Medicaid reform.

In 2003, this limited-government ideology was powerful enough to keep major health-insurance expansion off the table for Democrats. By 2011 that expansion had happened, but seemed like it could easily be rolled back, and Obama was officially committed to some form of the deficit reduction demanded by the Tea Party right. But since then we’ve lived through a Republican administration that failed to dislodge Obamacare and ditched entitlement reform, an unprecedented experiment in social spending to carry the country through the pandemic, and a further spending surge under Biden — with Joe Manchin, the most rightward Senate Democrat on fiscal matters, standing to the left of where Obama stood 10 years ago.

So not one but three right-of-center ideologies — crusading neoconservatism, moralizing religious conservatism, Tea Party government-cutting — have fallen to progressivism’s advance. Meanwhile the country is more racially diverse, pot is legal or semi-legal in many states, incarceration rates have fallen, and ideas once on the leftward fringe are dominant across media and academia. In all these ways and more, America in 2021 is the country that liberals in the Bush era wished they lived in: more liberal and permissive across multiple dimensions, less traditionally religious and heteronormative, less male-dominated and less white.

Of course human beings adapt to new circumstances, so I don’t exactly blame liberals for not sitting around congratulating themselves. Arguably the victories I’ve described make it that much more frustrating that Republicans are still leveraging Electoral College and Senate advantages to claim an undeserved share of power. Or that much more frightening that all these gains could be threatened by a potential Trumpian coup or constitutional crisis. Or that much more dispiriting that other big progressive goals — on racial equality or climate change — still seem out of reach.

On the other hand, maybe — just maybe — the sense of American decline and even doom hanging over certain liberals nowadays is a sign that their own vision, a society of ever-increasing social individualism under the protection of an expansive welfare state, actually leads to a somewhat darker future than they thought …

But no — now I’m straying from my official purpose here, which is to urge pessimistic liberals to cheer up.

You have the America you wanted. Make the most of it.

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
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#18908 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2021-October-03, 13:27

View PostGilithin, on 2021-October-02, 22:47, said:



Does a burning cross generate enough electricity to operate a laptop?
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Black Lives Matter. / "I need ammunition, not a ride." Zelensky
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#18909 User is offline   pilowsky 

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Posted 2021-October-03, 15:07

Actual data - published in 2015 with data from 2012.
Table 1: Individuals with Confirmed ID by Ethnicity
_____________PERCENTAGE OFPOPULATION_____CONFIRMED ID______________NO CONFIRMED ID
White_________________71% ____________________95%_________________________5%
Black ________________12% ____________________87% ________________________13%
Hispanic _____________11% ____________________90% ________________________10%
Other _________________6% ____________________89% ________________________11%
Don't Know ____________1% ____________________49% ________________________51%
Total _______________100% ____________________93% _________________________7%


14% of surveyed Americans "live" on less than $25,000/year (I don't know how you do that in the USA and still afford a car/internet/phone plan etc., not to mention food).

Here's the problem. If you are a person who is entitled to vote in a country, then the burden of providing sufficient evidence that you are a person is on the country as a whole, not the individual attempting to exercise their right.
Voting is a right conferred on every person.
Put another way; free speech is a cherished right in the USA. You can say any stupid thing you want (read this forum), but nobody demands a photo ID when you say it.

If you want to insist on voter ID, then the burden sits with you to ensure that everyone entitled to vote has equal access to it. If you don't, then you are discriminating.
If you make laws requiring something that the lawmaker doesn't provide, your discrimination is systemic.

Since the data shows that the discriminatory action differentially denies the right to vote from people of certain races, it is, by definition, systemic racism.

Interestingly, it also differentially affects young people, so it is also ageist.
If you disagree, then you are disingenuous.


If you are racist and didn't realise it, now would be a good time to wake up.

Instead of ranting, try reading - we'll all be better off.

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#18910 User is offline   Chas_P 

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Posted 2021-October-03, 17:35

View Posthrothgar, on 2021-October-03, 08:55, said:

Aw, looks like we hit a nerve

Indeed it did. It hit my funnybone. Your form of adolescent humor is truly amusing. Please keep up the good work.
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#18911 User is offline   Chas_P 

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Posted 2021-October-03, 18:00

View Posthrothgar, on 2021-October-03, 08:54, said:

Note to mention the fact that People of Color are much much less likely to have driver's licenses or other forms of ID

Did you even bother to read the website?
If you have questions, need more information, or have difficulty getting a free Voter Identification Card:

Please contact your county registrar’s office or
The Secretary of State’s Elections Division at:
Telephone (404) 656-2871 (8:00 a.m. - 5:30 p.m.)
V/TTY: (404) 656-1787
Fax: (404) 651-9531

What IDs Are Acceptable?
Any valid state or federal government-issued photo ID, including a free ID Card issued by your county registrar's office or the Georgia Department of Driver Services (DDS)
The State of Georgia offers a free ID Card. The ID Card can be issued at any county registrar's office free of charge.

To receive a voter identification card at the county registrar's office, the voter must provide:

A photo identity document or approved non-photo identity document that includes full legal name and date of birth.
Documentation showing the voter's date of birth.
Evidence that the applicant is a registered voter.
Documentation showing the applicant's name and residential address.


Does that sound like "disenfranchisement" to you? Does it? Really?
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#18912 User is offline   johnu 

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Posted 2021-October-04, 00:34

View Postpilowsky, on 2021-October-03, 15:07, said:

[size="3"]14% of surveyed Americans "live" on less than $25,000/year (I don't know how you do that in the USA and still afford a car/internet/phone plan etc., not to mention food).


Some get by on much less. And there are tens of millions of people that don't own cars but rely on public transportation or friends to get around. To be fair, many people could probably afford a car but choose not to because they live in urban centers (e.g. Manhattan) where cars are more of a liability than an asset. And tens of millions don't have internet which can be pretty expensive and tied to a permanent physical location, not good if you move around a lot in temporary housing. More people are likely to own either a landline for the entire family if they have a long time family home, or a cheap cell phone plan with limited data. As far as food, that's why the US has food stamps, welfare, and food banks so people aren't starving to death on the streets. QOP politicians don't like food assistance or any other assistance for poor people because they mistakenly believe that the poor are mostly minorities.
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#18913 User is offline   pilowsky 

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Posted 2021-October-04, 01:50

View Postjohnu, on 2021-October-04, 00:34, said:

Some get by on much less. And there are tens of millions of people that don't own cars but rely on public transportation or friends to get around. To be fair, many people could probably afford a car but choose not to because they live in urban centers (e.g. Manhattan) where cars are more of a liability than an asset. And tens of millions don't have internet which can be pretty expensive and tied to a permanent physical location, not good if you move around a lot in temporary housing. More people are likely to own either a landline for the entire family if they have a long time family home, or a cheap cell phone plan with limited data. As far as food, that's why the US has food stamps, welfare, and food banks so people aren't starving to death on the streets. QOP politicians don't like food assistance or any other assistance for poor people because they mistakenly believe that the poor are mostly minorities.


And that is presumably only referring to those eligible to vote - which is what the survey was about.
The real number of indigent unprotected poor in the USA - and many other wealthy countries including Australia - is likely much larger.
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#18914 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2021-October-04, 09:52

The Idiot's Conundrum:
The government cannot force us!
What about pregnant women?
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Black Lives Matter. / "I need ammunition, not a ride." Zelensky
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#18915 User is offline   barmar 

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Posted 2021-October-04, 10:56

View PostWinstonm, on 2021-October-04, 09:52, said:

The Idiot's Conundrum:
The government cannot force us!
What about pregnant women?

The answer from anti-abortionists is that the woman's right to control their body conflicts with the fetus's right to live, and the fetus wins, i.e. abortion = murder. If you're a libertarian who believes that the fetus is a person, it's a no-brainer.

#18916 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2021-October-04, 11:28

View Postbarmar, on 2021-October-04, 10:56, said:

The answer from anti-abortionists is that the woman's right to control their body conflicts with the fetus's right to live, and the fetus wins, i.e. abortion = murder. If you're a libertarian who believes that the fetus is a person, it's a no-brainer.


There is a distinction between “right to be born” and “right to live”. The libertarian simply wants to impose his beliefs in others without admitting that as the true aim.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Black Lives Matter. / "I need ammunition, not a ride." Zelensky
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#18917 User is offline   mycroft 

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Posted 2021-October-04, 11:33

But the libertarian also says "you can't force me to stop on the side of the road and save the life of the person dying from the accident".

So if the fetus is extracted from the mother, and left on the side of the road to live or die as it decides, it's not murder. In fact, requiring the pregnant person support the fetus without consent or a contract would be an immoral use of force. There is no reason why the fetus should win.

Same as it is an immoral use of force to require the other person in the conversation to pay support during and after the pregnancy without a contract - which is in fact the "pure" libertarian argument.

Which goes back to my base argument against libertarians as they actually exist - they don't see how logically their policies apply to someone *else*. "My rights, your restrictions on my rights" is the whole of their ideal Law.
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#18918 User is offline   Cyberyeti 

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Posted 2021-October-04, 11:58

View Postbarmar, on 2021-October-04, 10:56, said:

The answer from anti-abortionists is that the woman's right to control their body conflicts with the fetus's right to live, and the fetus wins, i.e. abortion = murder. If you're a libertarian who believes that the fetus is a person, it's a no-brainer.


Exactly, the religious right's imaginary friend tells them the fetus is a person. If you don't believe that ...
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#18919 User is offline   johnu 

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Posted 2021-October-04, 13:27

View Postmycroft, on 2021-October-04, 11:33, said:

But the libertarian also says "you can't force me to stop on the side of the road and save the life of the person dying from the accident".


I guess the Republican South Dakota Attorney General is a libertarian.

'His face was in your windshield': South Dakota AG faces impeachment charges as new details of fatal crash emerge

In this case, the Republican AG wouldn't stop at the side of the road to try to save the life of his victim when the victim had his face crash through his windshield.
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#18920 User is offline   Chas_P 

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Posted 2021-October-04, 18:08

View PostWinstonm, on 2021-October-03, 13:27, said:

Does a burning cross generate enough electricity to operate a laptop?

If electricity comes from electrons, does morality come from morons?
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