10683

Ken is unstoppable.

10684

Out of curiosity I checked this out, and it doesn’t appear that it actually makes it illegal to transport people to the polling place. Instead, it requires that people who do so fill out some form.

Still directed at suppressing votes, but not quite as bad as that claim made it seem.

10685

And the Poll Tax just required a nominal fee and A literacy test would never cause trouble.

10686

Yeah, I mean, it’s just the government requiring you to register to move from place to place if you want to vote.

txlaw
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10687

The Texas GOP is all about small government and reducing bureaucracy.

10688

Someone should tell them that.

10689

I mean… not having a form means it’s illegal.

Needing a form to give friends, or literally anyone you want, a ride anywhere for any reason is pretty fucked in my book.

Edit: Also the odds of a random person knowing this detail is close to zero, so those people would now be “law breakers” and will be dealt with accordingly.

10690

Where is a link to the provisions of the Texas law in question? I’m so tired of people posting stuff on Twitter or other places, or linking to Twitter etc. without actually providing a source. This Texas law is public record, and if a writer is zeroing in on a specific provision, it’s really easy to quote, cite, or reference the provisions. The devil is pretty much always in the details on these sorts of things. I mean, I’ve read Norm Ornstein a number of times and consider him a pretty good source and yet he can’t be arsed to actually quote the actual law? (Or maybe it’s not Norm - maybe the chain of tweets and quotes is the culprit).

TLDR: for the love of the baby Jesus people, quote your friggin’ sources people and if a tweet or whatever doesn’t contain sources, maybe, just maybe, consider not freakin’ posting it.

Edit: it looks like the culprit is Ornstein - he apparently posted a tweet full of outrage with no actual sourcing provided. I’m so tired of this.

10691

I believe this is it:

10692

So, in terms of what I could find in a quick look, that provision only applies to curbside voting and only requires the people providing transportation to fill out a form; there’s no penalty or other impediment to voting. Now maybe, there’s something worse hidden deeper in the text but I don’t have time or energy to ferret it out. Maybe Mr. Ornstein could have done the fucking work before posting, and provided some goddamn links, not just to the overall bill but to the actual provisions he’s criticizing.

The Texas law in question is a terrible package overall, but this particular provision is not a huge deal.

10693

It’s still pretty onerous and an obvious suppression tactic. It doesn’t need to have criminal penalties to be used by people with intent to intimidate. It’s not like the people using the notion that carpooling is “against the law” to intimidate others into not offering rides to the polls are going to mention the lack of a penalty or provide a copy of the bill.

The lack of a penalty is likely intentional. I imagine a penalty would make a suit against the law more viable. Without a penalty they can arugue “there’s no penalty so how can it possibly have a chilling effect?”

That said, yes, I also wish people would link or quote sources and not exaggerate.

10694

The other thing is, this provision does not apply to transporting people to the polls generally, but rather for use of special curbside voting provisions for people who cannot physically get to the polls themselves. (This is all buried in the details of the bills, and requires cross-referencing to the actual code in question) so it’s a provision with a very small effect. By failing to point that out, Mr. Ornstein made it seem like it was a general provision that restricted car pooling to vote in general terms, which it is not.

There are so many other problematic provisions in the Texas bill that focusing on this seems misguided.

10695

Yeah. The misreporting actually helps those who want the broader notion out there as a suppression tactic.

10696
10697

That was a great read, thank you.

10698

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others ; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were- cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

10699

I’ve been saying they took 1984 as a manual and IngSoc as an ideal for years.

10700

Good thing it’s not a covid passport, right?

10701

It really shows in how so many of the insurrections are people who were living a life of comfort. They had excess cash for their tacticool gear, their private plane to the revolution, their Trump flair, etc. They weren’t downtrodden. They lived comfortable, but meaningless, lives. If they had to struggle to get by theyy wouldn’t have time to waste thinking about how their life was just pointless luxury which somehow didn’t make them happy.

They search for meaning in their lives, for importance. Even with all their Instagram followers it still doesn’t satisfy their narcissism. They need to be part of something big and important. They become resentful that they can’t find this meaning. That their lives, the world, doesn’t hand them meaning and importance. And while they have their trucks and their guns and other toys they feel they are oppressed by something because they aren’t the important person on a mission from god that they clearly should be. The man is keeping them down! They must struggle against it! Join the good fight against the oppression that must be the reason they upper middle class nobody rather than a great leader of men.

Thus the quest for power for power’s sake. To feel powerful in their otherwise meaningless lives. To fill the emptiness inside.

10702

One thing to keep in mind when talking about the Trump-GOP in a meta-way is that in addition to all the arguments about principles, values, etc., there is also just a flat out factual discrepancy in the way that group perceives the world, based on decades of right wing media manipulation combined with a willing and vulnerable audience. I call it the reality disconnect: a ton of Trump supporters simply have a false, incomplete, manipulated or deceptive view of the world, which then allows them to claim principles which they are actually violating.

An example is the voting fight: they have a factual belief (erroneous but deeply held) that the 2020 election was stolen, that Democrats cheat in elections by various means (ignoring the lack of evidence), that “illegals” vote illicitly in large numbers (again, ignoring both a lack of evidence and contradictory evidence). They also have a distorted view of the impact of the voting bill provisions, claiming that restrictions actually improve voting access and so on. With those factual distortions in place, they can then claim to be defending democracy and the right to vote when they are in fact doing the opposite.

This type of reality disconnect affects pretty much every aspect of our politics. Non-Trump voters by and large see the reality but Trump voters are able to excuse all kinds of bad by believing “alternate facts”. Living on self-serving “facts” while being disconnected from reality basically enables anything the Trump folks want to do. There’s always a “fact” to justify a provision, even the extreme and cruel.

In many ways this is the hardest problem in American politics.