Social WR Lounge v 235: Arcane Rogue Trickster, but who likes Sickness?

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No, your whole physical existence at that point in time. I must know...

things could be better...then again, things could be a lot more worse.

I'm a "glass is half full" type of guy.

right now, I'm grateful for my health, still have a headful of hair, and full time job in the era of Covid.
 
because the gop hates democracy and can only win elections if they cheat.
Framed in a historical context towards Jim Crow laws, it completely undermines the counterpoint I've seen here time and time again of "that was the past and has no bearing on the present"

The liberals need to put some bite behind their bark and pursue sweeping federal voter laws that states can't undermine. It's honestly one of the most laughable aspects of American "democracy".
 
Framed in a historical context towards Jim Crow laws, it completely undermines the counterpoint I've seen here time and time again of "that was the past and has no bearing on the present"

The liberals need to put some bite behind their bark and pursue sweeping federal voter laws that states can't undermine. It's honestly one of the most laughable aspects of American "democracy".

Yep in re history

@Limbo Pete
 
Did y'all know about the Minister and the Quaker who broke into a UK base to sabotage warplanes that were being used to murder civilians?

Crazy ass story.
 
The law that you were defending had provisions for movies and swimming. And it was cash (that is, recipients of cash couldn't use cash on things they were deemed unworthy of).

Again, the same argument applies. People are in poverty and they need more money. If they get it from one source, you want the gov't to watch over their purchases to make sure they're not gettin' too big for their britches. If they get it from another source, you don't care how they spend it. It's sick, IMO. And this is really why I have so much contempt for True Progressives (@Trotsky). A bill passes that literally cuts child poverty in half, which should be celebrated as a truly great advance for America, and these POSes are whining that an unreasonable MW increase wasn't part of it and complaining that families that have been lifted out of poverty might spend their extra money on casinos and tattoos.
1, Regarding the "law that I was defending", I expressed in that thread how petty it was to include pools and movies. You called me tyrannical lmao!
2. I don't think its reasonable to expect them to watch over it, its a hypothetical question (however, if it becomes permanent I could see mechanisms put in place, like an HSA-type card).
3. It has nothing to do with making sure people aren't getting too big for their britches. How disgustingly dishonest of you. Its about protecting that money for its intended purpose, to help children. How do tattoos and casino gambling help children?
4. I must have missed the data that shows that child poverty has already been cut in half with the passing of this bill. Thats amazing. Source?
5. Maybe they should pass a "Tattoo and Casino Allowance Protection Bill?
 
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The specific purpose is to reduce poverty, and the whole reason it's a cash benefit is the assumption that people know better how to manage their limited resources than the gov't. I don't buy the argument that market income distribution is just "return on one's contribution of labor to the market," I guess, and I don't see it as plausibly progressive for what that's worth (kind of a market-worshipping thing that I think clouds people's vision). Market income is part of our system's income-distribution system just as much as transfer income. I think it's really hatred for the poor that is driving this stuff.



It's relevant throughout politics, as for people with a genuine interest in reducing poverty, True Progressives are a significant obstacle--almost as much as the right. "I'm so progressive that I actually oppose gov't transfers to reduce child poverty because those stupid poors might spend it on gambling and tattoos (poors love their tattoos, you know)."
Who is opposed to gov't transfers to reduce poverty?
 
This was posted in Polish's Voting Rights Act thread.

This is an article by "The Editors" of National Review, which conservatives have still clung to as an example of legitimate conservative intellectualism.

H.R. 1 Is a Partisan Assault on American Democracy

Wednesday night, the House passed H.R. 1, the “For the People Act.” It passed by ten votes, with every Republican voting against it, as well as Mississippi Democrat Bennie Thompson, who fears that the bill will abolish majority-black districts like his in the Deep South. Thompson deserves credit for reading past the title of the bill, which its cheerleaders in the media seem not to have done.

As to that title, H.R. 1 says that it is “For the People,” but tellingly, not by the people, or of the people. Quite the contrary.

It would be an understatement to describe H.R. 1 as a radical assault on American democracy, federalism, and free speech. It is actually several radical left-wing wish lists stuffed into a single 791-page sausage casing. It would override hundreds of state laws governing the orderly conduct of elections, federalize control of voting and elections to a degree without precedent in American history, end two centuries of state power to draw congressional districts, turn the Federal Elections Commission into a partisan weapon, and massively burden political speech against the government while offering government handouts to congressional campaigns and campus activists. Merely to describe the bill is to damn it, and describing it is a Herculean task in itself.

States have long experience running elections, and different states have taken different approaches suited to their own locales and populations. The federal government traditionally intervened only to prevent serious abuses of voting rights. H.R. 1 would upend that balance for no good reason, wrecking carefully refined state regimes for securing the vote. It also throws out much of the work of federal election laws passed with extensive bipartisan support in 1993 and 2002.


H.R. 1 bars states from checking with other states for duplicate registrations within six months of an election. It bars removing former voters from the rolls for failure to vote or to respond to mailings. Outside election observers are an important check on the system; H.R. 1 bars anyone but an election official from challenging a voter’s eligibility to vote on Election Day — thus insulating Democrat-run precincts from scrutiny.

State voter-ID laws are banned, replaced simply by a sworn voter statement. The dramatic expansion of mail-in voting during the COVID pandemic is enshrined permanently in federal law. States are banned from the most elementary security methods for mail-in ballots: They must provide a ballot to everyone without asking for identification and may not require notarization or a witness to signatures. States are compelled to permit ballot harvesting so long as the harvesters are not paid per ballot. Curbside voting, ballot drop boxes, and 15 days of early voting are mandated nationwide, and the bill micromanages the location and hours of polling stations, early voting locations, and drop boxes.

States are compelled to accept voter registrations from 16-year-olds, although they still cannot vote before turning 18 (an amendment to mandate that, too, was defeated). Democrats and their political allies, who rely on the youth vote, traditionally expend extensive resources registering young people. The bill shifts the job of signing up young voters to the federal government, which will pay to teach twelfth graders how to register, create a “Campus Vote Coordinator” position on college campuses, and award grants to colleges for “demonstrated excellence in registering students to vote.” This is measured in part by whether campuses provide rides to get students to the polls and whether they encourage both students and the communities around the campus to get “mobilized to vote.”

Restrictions on felon voting in federal elections in many states are overridden. This exceeds Congress’s constitutional authority over the conduct of elections by directly regulating who may vote, rather than how. In fact, the 14th Amendment expressly permits felons to be disenfranchised — as the Supreme Court held in 1974. State elections officials would be effectively banned from running for federal office by recusal requirements.



Not content to remake the American voting system, H.R. 1 takes the drawing of congressional districts out of the hands of elected state legislatures — who have done the job since the Founding — and turns them over to “independent” commissions, while banning mid-decade readjustments of district lines. It also counts inmates as residents of their last address (even if serving a life sentence), a provision aimed at reducing the representation of rural areas where prisons are located.

These are just the warm-ups. H.R. 1’s crackdowns on political speech are at least as extensive and biased as its changes to election law, and some of the provisions on coordination and foreign-related activity are so complex that even election-law experts warn that their impact is impossible to determine. For example, one provision could be read to bar corporations from political activity if they have even a single foreign shareholder. The new anti-speech laws would generate years of litigation, and many of them would likely be struck down by the Supreme Court.

New disclosure rules would treat huge amounts of speech and advertising on matters of public concern as if they were campaign contributions, including any advertisement urging viewers to contact elected officials to support or oppose a program, policy, or law. This would require donors to, say, the AARP to be identified as supporters of any candidate if the AARP demands that the candidate keep a promise to protect Social Security. The cumulative effect is to further burden citizen rights to petition and further insulate the government from criticism.

501(c)(4) nonprofits would be required to disclose their donors, another potentially unconstitutional burden on the freedom to speak and associate. New limits on corporate political activity are extensive, and similar restrictions are not placed on unions. Previous rules in place to enable free speech on the Internet and prevent political bias in IRS audits are repealed.

What would an omnibus bill be without handouts to unworthy causes, starting with the people who wrote the bill? H.R. 1 includes extensive public-funding giveaways to candidates, including a six-to-one public match for some donations to congressional and presidential campaigns. It also establishes a pilot program that gives voters $25 apiece to make government-funded donations to campaigns.

The labyrinth of new speech rules would be administered by the FEC, and so H.R. 1 eliminates the commission’s longstanding bipartisan structure and makes it more directly accountable to the president. We are sympathetic to efforts to make executive agencies more politically accountable, but the newly partisan structure of the FEC that would be created by H.R. 1 only illustrates why it should not wield such vast powers over elections.

There are reasonable issues to be taken with the current system of voting and elections, and constructive steps Congress could take. But not since the Alien and Sedition Acts has one political party in Congress sought to bend the power of the federal government, on partisan lines, toward crushing political opposition to this extent. H.R. 1 is not merely a bad idea; it is a scandal.



@Jack V Savage @kpt018 @PolishHeadlock2 This is such a shameless, odious, flagrantly dishonest piece - particularly with the pearl clutching about federal overreach, partisanship, and the lack of need to address election administration - that I don't know where to start. As something of a First Amendment scholar myself, the whining about how 501c4's might have to disclose their donors being a burden on free speech is what really gets me. They're saying money is speech....but its distribution as speech needs to be opaque and the identity of the speaker withheld.
 


But both parties are the same and cutting child poverty in half is bad because the stupid poors will just spend their money on tattoos and gambling according to leftists.

Who thinks cutting child poverty in half is bad? If we all get tattoos will that cut it by 100%?
 
Framed in a historical context towards Jim Crow laws, it completely undermines the counterpoint I've seen here time and time again of "that was the past and has no bearing on the present"

The liberals need to put some bite behind their bark and pursue sweeping federal voter laws that states can't undermine. It's honestly one of the most laughable aspects of American "democracy".

Yep in re history

@Limbo Pete

I like to approach systemic racism, particularly voting rights discrimination, by asking people when they or their parent's were born (depending on how old they are). I then segue into how the people you see screaming and beating blacks in civil rights footage... well, many of them are still quite alive. And if not them, then their children. More importantly, the ideas are still there, too. It wasn't that long ago Wallace was standing on the steps; that isn't acceptable now on the surface, but the idea behind what he did absolutely never went away. And why would it? The people that fought tooth and fucking nail to preserve discrimination didn't vanish overnight, so why the hell would their ideas? The current assault on voting rights is a direct extension of the views that sought to limit them prior to the Voting Rights Act. It is the same fight.
 
1, Regarding the "law that I was defending", I expressed in that thread how petty it was to include pools and movies. You called me tyrannical lmao!
2. I don't think its reasonable to expect them to watch over it, its a hypothetical question (however, if it becomes permanent I could see mechanisms put in place, like an HSA-type card).
3. It has nothing to do with making sure people aren't getting too big for their britches. How disgustingly dishonest of you. Its about protecting that money for its intended purpose, to help children. How do tattoos and casino gambling help children?
4. I must have missed the data that shows that child poverty has already been cut in half with the passing of this bill. Thats amazing. Source?
5. Maybe they should pass a "Tattoo and Casino Allowance Protection Bill?

1. I said that you supported imposing tyrannical restrictions on poor people because you supported a law that made the gov't to monitor the purchases of TANF recipients and prevent them from certain types of purchases (with cash). The argument there was similar to the one you're making here. If people are lifted out of poverty, they might spend the money badly, unlike currently non-poor people who we know are virtuous enough to spend money properly because of the fact that they're not poor.
2. Yes, you made the argument that the law was so badly written that it would be difficult to enforce as part of the reason it was good. Heroically stupid, though I guess not as cruel as your other arguments.
3. The bill included more than tattoos and casino gambling, and you know it. Furthermore, WTF? Imagine thinking that poor people using welfare to buy tattoos is a major problem in America. Like, don't you feel stupid even typing that?
4. I linked to analysis on it, which itself linked to a piece analyzing the impact. Of course since it's the evil Democrats who passed it, True Progressives have to stretch for some reason to declare lifting kids out of poverty to be bad, and you landed on the argument that if they have too much money, they might get a bunch of tattoos.
5. Or just let people spend their own money how they think is best without piece of shit leftists, who see politics solely as an arena for self-aggrandizement and don't give a shit about anyone but themselves, telling them what to do.
 
Framed in a historical context towards Jim Crow laws, it completely undermines the counterpoint I've seen here time and time again of "that was the past and has no bearing on the present"

The liberals need to put some bite behind their bark and pursue sweeping federal voter laws that states can't undermine. It's honestly one of the most laughable aspects of American "democracy".



say what you will about modern day democrats but they’re not out there trying to make it hard for people to vote. As far as I know this doesn’t exist anywhere on the democrat side of the aisle.

They know exactly what they’re doing and it does cast the light of Jim Crow policies. They act shock when people call them racist.
 
Who thinks cutting child poverty in half is bad? If we all get tattoos will that cut it by 100%?

Dude, your reaction to seeing a massively important bill that cuts child poverty in half was to screech about how the money will be wasted. Which, again, despite what @Trotsky says, applies equally to all forms of income.
 
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