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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Trump has his own secret police. Wonderful.
Yeah, liberals arming themselves suddenly isn't looking like such a terrible idea all of a sudden.
"We'll take the next chance, and the next, until we win, or the chances are spent."Exactly. They didn't need to sign a law that said "Black People Cannot Vote" to enact criminal levels of voter suppression and steal numerous elections - including this one. It's easy to stay within the letter of the law when you're the one writing the laws.
"We'll take the next chance, and the next, until we win, or the chances are spent."Well, I was mostly saying that under the assumption that they WOULDN'T be explicit. As I understand it, that's how voter suppression works for them too, nothing SPECIFICALLY targets minorities and the poor but they choose measures to make it much more difficult for them to be registered and vote. Since nothing in the laws is explicit they can always play dumb and defend the measures by making statements that sound somewhat reasonable to the uninformed.
I have to confess I have no idea how that would work with gun ownership though.
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I read last week that the voter suppression targeting african-americans might have cost Al Gore the electoral votes in Florida, just for another example of this.
edited 20th Dec '16 5:27:52 PM by Draghinazzo
Don't you already need I Ds to buy guns though? I'm having a tough time thinking of qualifiers they could use that wouldn't also anger the NRA lobby.
I have just as much contempt for those people as everybody else, but even I would balk at the idea of adopting the GOP's voter suppression tactics for use against them. Those tactics are blatantly undemocratic and fly in the face of the Constitution. If we copy their playbook too heavily, are we really any better than they are?
Well...yes, I suppose. But not by enough.
"We'll take the next chance, and the next, until we win, or the chances are spent."Probably the easiest way of doing it would to reduce the number of polling stations in urban areas- force them to travel large distances to vote. But even that would be tricky- in cities it's easy to say 'what's the difference between 19 and 20 polling stations?', but in small towns you'd need a damn good reason to shut down the only polling place in town.
There's no way to actually ban them from voting that wouldn't be horrifyingly undemocratic.
I'd argue that Democrats would still be better because they're doing it for noble reasons. Of course Well-Intentioned Extremist is a trope for a reason.
The way the voter suppression of minorities works without specifically stating "black people can't vote" kind of reminds me of the Adam Ruins Everything episode covering drugs. According to the show, one of the original reasons for the "War on Drugs" was because that made it easier crack down on people the government didn't like.
- John Ehrlichman: We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
edited 20th Dec '16 5:40:57 PM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprisedThe main thing for me is that while I support being pragmatic, you can only be so pragmatic before your victory becomes pyrrhic.
Currently, the democrats largely respect the laws, respect science, respect people who aren't white, and respect democracy. There has to be a bare minimum one can't compromise on, lest the person you're voting for become way too close to the opposition to be an improvement.
That and, again, I don't want to do anything that would validate the intellectually lazy and grating "both parties are equally bad" bullshit, or much of the republican conspiracies and scare tactics.
edited 20th Dec '16 5:43:06 PM by Draghinazzo

{Face Palm}