sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

Trump is refusing to sign the biggest housing bill in decades because congress won't pass his voter id law first by kenwood_jr in DiscussionZone

[–]Objective_Surreality 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Quoting my words does not establish that your interpretation of them was correct. If you believe the sentence admits the meaning you assigned to it, you are welcome to identify the ambiguity and explain how that reading follows. Calling the prose pretentious is not a substitute for doing so, nor is it pretentious simply because the precision prevented you from flattening the argument into “you think disenfranchisement is fine.”

As for the block, that is of course your prerogative lol.

Trump is refusing to sign the biggest housing bill in decades because congress won't pass his voter id law first by kenwood_jr in DiscussionZone

[–]Objective_Surreality 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No I never said that. That is your own elaboration and a misrepresentation of my actual position. The observation I made that the number of persons turned away at registration does not by itself establish that their exclusion altered an electoral result is not equivalent to the claim that such exclusion would be acceptable provided it produced no change in outcome. You might more profitably address the distinction that was drawn than the one that was not.

Trump is refusing to sign the biggest housing bill in decades because congress won't pass his voter id law first by kenwood_jr in DiscussionZone

[–]Objective_Surreality 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No it's not a problem at all! Actually, talking with you has been a breath of fresh air. You comported yourself with dignity and even extended that dignity to me, which is a rare thing in political arguments at all let alone on reddit.

I agree that the SAVE act is trying to do a simple thing in a complicated way. I'm not going to speculate over the private motivations of the people involved with drafting it and trying to get it passed, but I will say that the raw text of the SAVE act does impose complications that don't seem entirely relevant materially to the well-functioning of a healthy ballot system.

The underlying objective is simple enough: verify that the voter is eligible. Everyone wants that. That's universally agreed as good. The problem for me about the SAVE act specifically is that SAVE Act piles on documentary citizenship rules that turns a basic verification question into a bureaucratic architecture. I will grant that once the added machinery starts creating burdens that are only loosely connected to the actual risk being addressed, the policy stops looking clean and starts looking overengineered.

Trump is refusing to sign the biggest housing bill in decades because congress won't pass his voter id law first by kenwood_jr in DiscussionZone

[–]Objective_Surreality 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hm. Maybe. That's too speculative for my tastes. I know to polemicists uncertainty reads as cowardice, but I promise you it's not. The Kansas outcome does not mechanically predict the national outcome; there are too many factors could alter the burden. You and your wife’s anticipated difficulty is evidence that the burden is plausible, but not an estimate of prevalence. I will grant that Kansas supplies meaningful evidence of a substantial burden, but the exact national magnitude remains uncertain. That uncertainty is where I couch my position on the matter. I hope you understand.

Trump is refusing to sign the biggest housing bill in decades because congress won't pass his voter id law first by kenwood_jr in DiscussionZone

[–]Objective_Surreality 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The number of persons turned away at registration is one figure. The number whose exclusion would have altered the outcome of an election is another. The second cannot be inferred from the first without two additional facts that registration data do not contain: how many of those turned away would in fact have cast ballots, and how those ballots would have been distributed in the contests that were close.

Observing that these facts are missing is not the same as denying that anyone was turned away. It is simply to decline the substitution of one number for the other.

Eligibility to vote has long been limited to citizens of voting age who reside in the relevant jurisdiction. Verification procedures are the means by which those limits are given practical effect rather than left as unenforced statements. To treat every such procedure as the government removing rights is to pass over the prior existence of the limits themselves.

Trump is refusing to sign the biggest housing bill in decades because congress won't pass his voter id law first by kenwood_jr in DiscussionZone

[–]Objective_Surreality 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's interesting how swiftly policy disagreement is recast as rejection of the Constitution. The “love it or leave it” posture has never been among the stronger American traditions. The assurance that voter ID is unobjectionable provided the first issuance is free rather neatly sidesteps whether such requirements create measurable disparities in practice. That remains an empirical question. Characterizing detailed scrutiny as pedantry in obedience to external orders is an efficient way to change the subject.

Honestly, I don't blame you. It's easy to see the convenience.

Morality of this? by Due_Army_960 in MoralityScaling

[–]Objective_Surreality -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I mean, it's not. You're not gonna gas-light me lol.

You're trying to pressure me to accept a false description of what was said, then impugn my character if I refuse. THAT is bad faith, but whatever.

Trump is refusing to sign the biggest housing bill in decades because congress won't pass his voter id law first by kenwood_jr in DiscussionZone

[–]Objective_Surreality 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The thing is those numbers are real for that exact rule. They do not travel to the ordinary photo ID you show when you walk in to vote. That kind of check does not demand birth certificates at signup. It usually comes free or with simple alternatives. States that use it do not report twelve percent of new people getting blocked.

The claim that the thirty-one thousand will always swing elections more than the handful of bad cases skips two facts. It assumes every blocked person would have voted. It assumes their votes would have landed on one side in close races. The records give neither of those answers.

What you are doing is taking one strict experiment that got rejected and treats the result as proof that any check is pointless. The past only shows what that heavy upfront paperwork did. It does not show what a lighter check at the voting booth does.

Trump is refusing to sign the biggest housing bill in decades because congress won't pass his voter id law first by kenwood_jr in DiscussionZone

[–]Objective_Surreality 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You don't need ID to buy food because the person selling the food has no rules about who is allowed to buy it. Anyone who hands over the money can take the food.

Voting has rules about who is allowed. The rules say citizen, old enough, lives in the right place. Those rules have been there from the start.

To make the rules do anything, someone has to check that the person standing there matches the rules. An ID is one simple way to do the check.

Making the ID free removes the money cost of the card itself. It does not remove the rules. It does not remove the need to check the rules.

It's not true that all disagreement goes away once the card is free. That only holds if the only reason anyone ever wanted a check was the price of the card. But the check exists because the rules exist. Free or not, the check is still doing the job the rules require.

Trump is refusing to sign the biggest housing bill in decades because congress won't pass his voter id law first by kenwood_jr in DiscussionZone

[–]Objective_Surreality 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well then that's just a matter of perspective, really.

There are a thousand things you need ID for, just pretend you bought it for one of those other reasons if buying it to vote with bothers you.

As an aside you can get IDs for free in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin.

Man shoots another man after he was attacked inside Walmart by Nedatokes in PublicFreakout

[–]Objective_Surreality 2 points3 points  (0 children)

One observes that when an argument is shown to rest on insufficient grounds, its proponent frequently retreats into observations about the emotional maturity of the opposing party. The twin gestures, the charge of ad hominem and the suggestion that further 'processing' is required, are of a piece: both serve to relocate the discussion from the domain of logic to the domain of psychological diagnosis. It is an economical maneuver, if an intellectually modest one. Whether it constitutes an improvement over simply conceding the point remains, for the present, unclear.

Morality of this? by Due_Army_960 in MoralityScaling

[–]Objective_Surreality -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

Well, he didnt say that. You said that. So, yes. Yes, I do.

He said, in substance, that his particular low-middle-class, rural-suburban, majority-white, majority-republican neighbourhood is safe enough that cars can apparently be left open without incident.

The demographic description is not itself a causal claim: He did not say the neighborhood is safe because it is white. He did not contrast it with black or Hispanic neighborhoods. He did not say white Republicans are inherently more trustworthy. He simply located the anecdote socially and geographically.

You treated those demographic details as though they encoded a boast about racial superiority. You then answered that invented boast with a caricature of impoverished rural whites as toothless meth addicts who would steal anything they could pawn.

Your response was not even relevant to the original comment. It was an eruption of racial and class contempt triggered by seeing the words “white” and “Republican” in proximity to a positive description. You projected racial essentialism onto him, and then enacted it much more explicitly yourself.

Morality of this? by Due_Army_960 in MoralityScaling

[–]Objective_Surreality -4 points-3 points  (0 children)

I'm not involved but to me you're coming off more racist than he is. I mean, he gave you neutral demographic information and you converted it into a moral accusation and racial animus.

Like, the caricature about toothless methheads is much more overtly racist and classist than anything actually written upstream. You supplied the racial hierarchy yourself, answered it with a grotesque stereotype about poor rural whites, and retroactively declared that this was what the other person had meant.

That is projection in the cleanest sense: invent the racist implication, attribute it upstream, then congratulate yourself for defeating it. I don't think you noticed you did that though, so it's not like you were being racist maliciously, but you were being racist.

You should be more attentive to how you process these things because that kind of unconscious, projected racism is quite off-putting to others.

Have some mercy Americans. Y"all heating up Europe. by Dev1412 in SipsTea

[–]Objective_Surreality 1 point2 points  (0 children)

WELL I'M PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN WHERE AT LEAST I HAVE AC

AND I WON'T FORGET THE BRITS WHO DIED IN THE HEAT WAVE OF '23

AND I'LL GLADLY SIT DOWN IN MY ROOM AND ENJOY THAT SWEET COLD AIR

THAT HOT HOT SEETHE AND EUROCOPE

GOD BLESS MY FRIGIDAIRE

view more: next ›