Civil Unrest next level or the beginning of the failure of our democracy

How about the Dakota’s requiring a street address to vote, when Native Americans living on reservation land by law are not apportioned addresses but use PO boxes instead. A move explicitly and only used to prevent Native American citizens from voting.

There is a god damn huge difference between trying to get more voters to turn out, and carefully crafting policy to make it so minority and poor voters cannot vote.

I mean, Christ, it’s not even comparable.
Getting more people to vote? objectively good
Specifically targeting groups to prevent them from voting? Objectively evil.

You do see that, don’t you? And you see why saying ‘Democrats want more people to vote, since they will vote for them, is the same as Republicans preventing people from voting’ is getting a massive negative reaction.

I really don’t think you’re reading and thinking about what i’m actually saying - at this point, it’s just turned into you all rehashing your talking points about race and throwing them out regardless of what is actually being talked about.

I’m done with this one.

You’re ignoring facts and things the Republicans have openly said.

And then saying racism doesn’t exist cause they aren’t coming after Asians in the suburbs.

It’s bullshit. It’s not even good bullshit.

Then when presented with information that counters what you’re saying, you willfully ignore it and play victim.

Because your point is bad! I do get your point, but it is boiling down to ‘doing a good thing is equal to doing a bad thing’. Which is not a good look.

That’s one possibility, but there is another…

I think you folks are being overly antagonistic towards SlyFrog.

He’s not some asshole troll like GMan, he’s been around. He deserves the respect of a calm discussion, even if his position is mistaken.

Which I think it pretty clearly is, given that we’ve had multiple cases of GOP representatives literally say that they are intending to suppress the vote of minority groups.

I don’t know how to argue with someone that doesn’t believe in reality.

…are disinvited from Armando’s famous Christmas hootenanny?

My Christmas party kinda blows, tbh. 12 hours of intense cooking during which I’m very bossy and short-tempered, followed by an uncomfortable family meal wherein I try very hard not to reveal I’m a hardlining atheist so that mom doesn’t suffer an emotional breakdown and wherein we all quietly hope that my partner’s genuinely insane mother doesn’t show up with a gun to kidnap her, since they haven’t been on speaking terms in quite some time and she’s sent a lot of increasingly threatening and insane emails, letters, and voicemails in the last few months.

But my sickass birthday party? Oh yeah. Super disinvited.

I’m not treating him like a troll, and I do not view him as such.

But his point did boil down to suppressing minority and poor voters is equivalent to encouraging those same voters to vote. Which isn’t a defensible opinion. It’s strictly a zero sum partisan look at the effects.

Policy A benefits Dems
Policy B benefits GOP
Ergo Policy A and B are morally equivalent.

But they’re not.

Equivalent would be Illinois closing all but one of the polling stations south of Springfield, forcing voters in Ana Jonesboro to drive two hours.

Equivalent would be making a law that you can’t register to vote if you don’t share your I-pass registration (for those that don’t know it is an automated tollway transponder, and the toll booths are exclusively located in the Chicago metro, so voters in the southern and western part of the state would be unlikely to have one).

Equivalent would be straight up creating limits on voting for people who have economic indicators of being rural or farmers.

They don’t do those things, and definitely not at the scale of the GOP. So while I am not trying to be specifically antagonistic to @SlyFrog, his core point is requiring a strong rebuttal.

I think my main takeaway is that SlyFrog seems to believe that morals or ethics have nothing to do with any of this. Republicans and Democrats are equal in that regard, only acting to improve their voting pool.

Morally good = enabling easier voter registration, making sure people’s voices count, making it easier to vote and have your voice heard.

Morally bad = trying to prevent certain people from voting, trying to ensure that your party remains in control no matter what the majority of people want, etc.

The morality and values of the parties are simply incomparable at this point in time. If your party is somehow harmed by allowing ALL the people to vote in fair and just elections then maybe your party is complete shit?

Yes. Because they don’t vote Republican.

I never said they aren’t trying to suppress the vote of minority groups. They clearly are. That was not my point. Not that it matters once people stop thinking and start responding to straw men and signaling.

That doesn’t make it ok! And that doesn’t make it morally equivalent to trying to get more people to vote for you.

And we are not responding to a straw man. Your literal words

In response to the GOP trying to prevent minoroties from voting. How is this anything but a rationalization and justification for voter suppression?

I never said that it did. The straw man did though, so it was fun watching people respond to it.

“How is the GOP actively suppressing targeted groups? I do not recall any “X race may not vote” laws.”

If you clearly see that they’re suppressing minorities, why did you ask me this? Trolling?

Ahh, so trolling it is.

Of course. It’s always trolling when it doesn’t fit a talking point.

Yes, this is perhaps true, although it’s a very subtle point.

It’s true that the GOP doesn’t disenfranchise black voters out of a sense of racism… they disenfranchise them because they know that most of those votes will be for Democrats. If those voters voted for the GOP, the GOP would help them vote.

It’s weird though, because it’s kind of related… a lot of the GOP’s polices at this point disenfranchise those groups in other ways, so it’s not like their lack of support amongst those groups is just random. Also, at this point, the GOP has clearly chosen to embrace racism because some non-trivial portion of the GOP base is in fact racist, and being racist earns the GOP points with those guys.

On some level, it ties into what I said about Trump and his supporters who may not have been directly voting for him because of his racist policies:
If you exploit racism to get votes, you are in fact racist.
If you excuse racism, you are racist, because to do so means that you don’t care about those people who are being oppressed.

Agreed.

Vos said he welcomed the possible challenges, expressing confidence in the legitimacy of the legislature’s actions. He and Fitzgerald, the Senate majority leader, were also betting that their GOP members—many of whom hail from gerrymandered legislative districts—can defend their bills when they next face the voters themselves. Indeed, Republicans may have rushed through their legislation after a debate that occurred in the dark of night, but they were surprisingly forthcoming about why they were doing it. Without the new limits on Evers’s power, Vos said, according to Wisconsin Public Radio, “we are going to have a very liberal governor who is going to enact policies that are in direct contrast to what many of us believe in.”

That liberal governor, and those liberal policies, may be what Wisconsin voters wanted when they elected Evers last month. But after Republicans in the legislature insisted on having their say on Wednesday, that agenda may not be what the voters actually get.

How long until these dudes are swinging by their heels from lamp posts?

If you never said that, then what could you possibly have meant by this?

I mean, do you recognize and acknowledge that the GOP is actively trying to suppress the vote of minority groups, or do you wonder skeptically whether they are trying to do so because you haven’t seen any explicit laws against voting by minorities? It can’t really be both, can it?