Interesting OBJECTIVE observations

[46zilzal]

from https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...-fight-to-vote

quote: America has long held itself up as the world’s leading democracy, but it has an equally long history of denying people the right to vote.

While many states do not require voters to have a reason to vote by mail, Texas only allows voters to do so if they are 65 or older or meet other conditions. The state does not allow people to register to vote online.

Even with a flood of Covid cases, Texas has successfully fought tooth and nail in federal and state courts to uphold those restrictions. Last month, Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, a Republican, abruptly issued an order that limited each county in the state to offer one ballot drop box. The move meant that Democratic-friendly Harris county, which stretches more than 2,000 miles and is home to 2.4 million registered voters, could only offer one place for voters to return their ballots. The state of Rhode Island, which is smaller than Harris county, will have more drop-off locations this year.

“The forces that were fine with poll taxes and literacy tests are the same kinds of forces that are equally comfortable in the 21st century with ‘targeting African Americans with almost surgical precision’ in voter IDs and requiring extra hurdles to cast an absentee ballot in the midst of a global pandemic,” said Carol Anderson, a professor at Emory University in Atlanta who has written extensively about voter suppression, in an email.

[boxcar]

Originally Posted by 46zilzal

from https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...-fight-to-vote

quote: America has long held itself up as the world’s leading democracy, but it has an equally long history of denying people the right to vote.

While many states do not require voters to have a reason to vote by mail, Texas only allows voters to do so if they are 65 or older or meet other conditions. The state does not allow people to register to vote online.

Even with a flood of Covid cases, Texas has successfully fought tooth and nail in federal and state courts to uphold those restrictions. Last month, Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, a Republican, abruptly issued an order that limited each county in the state to offer one ballot drop box. The move meant that Democratic-friendly Harris county, which stretches more than 2,000 miles and is home to 2.4 million registered voters, could only offer one place for voters to return their ballots. The state of Rhode Island, which is smaller than Harris county, will have more drop-off locations this year.

“The forces that were fine with poll taxes and literacy tests are the same kinds of forces that are equally comfortable in the 21st century with ‘targeting African Americans with almost surgical precision’ in voter IDs and requiring extra hurdles to cast an absentee ballot in the midst of a global pandemic,” said Carol Anderson, a professor at Emory University in Atlanta who has written extensively about voter suppression, in an email.

So, the rules only apply to black folks?

Also, are there any states out there in WWW as to how many American black people are walking around without any I.D.s to their name (good pun intended).

[PaceAdvantage]

"Objective"

YouTube

[Mulerider]

Originally Posted by 46zilzal

from https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...-fight-to-vote

“The forces that were fine with poll taxes and literacy tests are the same kinds of forces that are equally comfortable in the 21st century with ‘targeting African Americans with almost surgical precision’ in voter IDs and requiring extra hurdles to cast an absentee ballot i

Let's put this "onerous" Texas voter ID nonsense to rest.

There are 7 different types of acceptable photo ID in Texas. If the voter doesn't have photo ID, then the voter may instead use one of the following:

1. Copy (or original) of a govt. document showing the voter's name and address.

2. Copy of a current utility bill

3. Copy of a bank statement

4. Copy of a government check

5. Copy of a paycheck

6. Copy of a birth certificate or a court-ordered document attesting to identity

If the person is using photo ID, it may be expired for up to 4 years and still be accepted.

[tucker6]

Originally Posted by Mulerider

Let's put this "onerous" Texas voter ID nonsense to rest.

There are 7 different types of acceptable photo ID in Texas. If the voter doesn't have photo ID, then the voter may instead use one of the following:

1. Copy (or original) of a govt. document showing the voter's name and address.

2. Copy of a current utility bill

3. Copy of a bank statement

4. Copy of a government check

5. Copy of a paycheck

6. Copy of a birth certificate or a court-ordered document attesting to identity

If the person is using photo ID, it may be expired for up to 4 years and still be accepted.

Let's compare that to what my wife needed to get one of those "real" driver IDs.

old DL
birth cert
every single record of name change
two forms of address verification
current insurance card

now that's onerous...

[46zilzal]

"The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is."
- Winston Churchill

[boxcar]

Originally Posted by 46zilzal

"The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is."
- Winston Churchill

Yeah, that "incontrovertible truth" is that it's far more difficult to get a "real I.D." driver's license than it is to vote. Wonder why that is...

[davew]

interesting objective observations by Tom Woods

With Massachusetts seeing a rise in "cases," I saw someone on Twitter lamenting that he and his fellow Massachusetts residents had "dropped the ball."

Notice that this person cannot admit that the voodoo doesn't work. It's always because the peasants didn't comply enough.

If you stupid people would just obey us, this thing would go away!

I understand why progressives might be attracted to this way of thinking:

(1) They hold a superstitious belief in the powers of the state -- so if the state says it can wipe out a virus, who's to say it can't?
(2) It involves "experts" dictating to the stupid rubes, which is their preferred model of governance.
(3) It allows them to ridicule the working-class people they despise -- why, if only these backward hicks would "follow the science," we'd be out of this thing already!

But let's face facts:

Lockdowns only delay the inevitable, and they leave wreckage in their wake.

(And forget about masks: as I've shown before, mask mandates have no discernible effect on the spread of the virus. If they were as effective as people say -- e.g., if we'd just wear masks for six weeks, we'd be out of this! -- there should be some obvious effect on the charts, but there just isn't. Believe me, I wish masks could solve the problem so I could get the rest of my life back.)

Peru, Belgium, and the UK (to name three of many examples) had hard lockdowns, and high death rates. Belgium and the UK are locking back down, as is much of Europe.

The crazies, when faced with this data, try to claim that such-and-such country didn't lock down early enough. It can't be that lockdowns don't work, remember. (It's super-scientific to assume a priori that the approach works!) No, it's always that those stupid people didn't "listen to the science," even though there is precisely zero "science" behind lockdowns. There's no guidebook, no nothing. Lockdowns weren't even a thing until 2020.

But you certainly can't say that Spain didn't lock down early and hard.

Or Italy, for that matter, much as they try to.

Now the same European countries whose insufferable intellectuals have been lecturing the U.S. for its handling of the crisis are seeking spikes in deaths again.

In Italy, and in the UK, and here and there in other places, at least some people are fighting back.

The last lockdown took everything they had. One video, which has gone viral, shows an Italian woman crying that she has lost everything and has nothing to feed her child.

I guess she'd better "listen to the science," right?

What a sick, deranged cult this is.

And what is the point of indefinitely depriving ourselves of what makes life worth living, so we can live in an antisocial dystopia? What are we staying alive for then? So we can sit at home and stare at the wall?

There are other concerns in the world apart from COVID-19. Incredible that this should have to be said.

Even some of the elderly are starting to say: I'm at the end of my life, and you want me to spend my final months and years like a vegetable? What's the point?

Meanwhile, vastly more deaths are being caused elsewhere by the policy. Oxford's Sunetra Gupta just published a column in the Daily Mail arguing that the response to the virus has been worse than the virus itself.

Even the New York Times noted that excess deaths from TB, HIV, and malaria caused as a direct result of the lockdowns will exceed two million.

I could go on and on about the collateral deaths, but I'm probably sounding like a broken record by now.

As Professor Gupta puts it, "Lockdown is a luxury of the affluent; something that can be afforded only in wealthy countries -- and even then, only by the better-off households in those countries."

By the way, Prof. Gupta describes her politics as "left-wing," and is aghast that people think she's part of a right-wing conspiracy because she opposes barbaric lockdowns.

In her column, she pointed to a new initiative aimed at chronicling the devastating effects of lockdowns. I thought you might be interested to take a look:

http://www.collateralglobal.org

[boxcar]

Originally Posted by davew

interesting objective observations by Tom Woods

With Massachusetts seeing a rise in "cases," I saw someone on Twitter lamenting that he and his fellow Massachusetts residents had "dropped the ball."

Notice that this person cannot admit that the voodoo doesn't work. It's always because the peasants didn't comply enough.

If you stupid people would just obey us, this thing would go away!

I understand why progressives might be attracted to this way of thinking:

(1) They hold a superstitious belief in the powers of the state -- so if the state says it can wipe out a virus, who's to say it can't?
(2) It involves "experts" dictating to the stupid rubes, which is their preferred model of governance.
(3) It allows them to ridicule the working-class people they despise -- why, if only these backward hicks would "follow the science," we'd be out of this thing already!

But let's face facts:

Lockdowns only delay the inevitable, and they leave wreckage in their wake.

(And forget about masks: as I've shown before, mask mandates have no discernible effect on the spread of the virus. If they were as effective as people say -- e.g., if we'd just wear masks for six weeks, we'd be out of this! -- there should be some obvious effect on the charts, but there just isn't. Believe me, I wish masks could solve the problem so I could get the rest of my life back.)

Peru, Belgium, and the UK (to name three of many examples) had hard lockdowns, and high death rates. Belgium and the UK are locking back down, as is much of Europe.

The crazies, when faced with this data, try to claim that such-and-such country didn't lock down early enough. It can't be that lockdowns don't work, remember. (It's super-scientific to assume a priori that the approach works!) No, it's always that those stupid people didn't "listen to the science," even though there is precisely zero "science" behind lockdowns. There's no guidebook, no nothing. Lockdowns weren't even a thing until 2020.

But you certainly can't say that Spain didn't lock down early and hard.

Or Italy, for that matter, much as they try to.

Now the same European countries whose insufferable intellectuals have been lecturing the U.S. for its handling of the crisis are seeking spikes in deaths again.

In Italy, and in the UK, and here and there in other places, at least some people are fighting back.

The last lockdown took everything they had. One video, which has gone viral, shows an Italian woman crying that she has lost everything and has nothing to feed her child.

I guess she'd better "listen to the science," right?

What a sick, deranged cult this is.

And what is the point of indefinitely depriving ourselves of what makes life worth living, so we can live in an antisocial dystopia? What are we staying alive for then? So we can sit at home and stare at the wall?

There are other concerns in the world apart from COVID-19. Incredible that this should have to be said.

Even some of the elderly are starting to say: I'm at the end of my life, and you want me to spend my final months and years like a vegetable? What's the point?

Meanwhile, vastly more deaths are being caused elsewhere by the policy. Oxford's Sunetra Gupta just published a column in the Daily Mail arguing that the response to the virus has been worse than the virus itself.

Even the New York Times noted that excess deaths from TB, HIV, and malaria caused as a direct result of the lockdowns will exceed two million.

I could go on and on about the collateral deaths, but I'm probably sounding like a broken record by now.

[b ]As Professor Gupta puts it, "Lockdown is a luxury of the affluent; something that can be afforded only in wealthy countries -- and even then, only by the better-off households in those countries."[/b]

By the way, Prof. Gupta describes her politics as "left-wing," and is aghast that people think she's part of a right-wing conspiracy because she opposes barbaric lockdowns.

In her column, she pointed to a new initiative aimed at chronicling the devastating effects of lockdowns. I thought you might be interested to take a look:

http://www.collateralglobal.org

Exactly right! The elitists-wealthy don't ever worry about lockdowns because because they're not going to affected by them -- ever! Dr. Fauci could preach lockdowns for the next 5 years and for all that time be collecting his paycheck every week, two weeks, whatever -- never skipping a beat.

[ElKabong]

Originally Posted by 46zilzal

from https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...-fight-to-vote

quote: America has long held itself up as the world’s leading democracy, but it has an equally long history of denying people the right to vote.

While many states do not require voters to have a reason to vote by mail, Texas only allows voters to do so if they are 65 or older or meet other conditions. The state does not allow people to register to vote online.

Even with a flood of Covid cases, Texas has successfully fought tooth and nail in federal and state courts to uphold those restrictions. Last month, Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, a Republican, abruptly issued an order that limited each county in the state to offer one ballot drop box. The move meant that Democratic-friendly Harris county, which stretches more than 2,000 miles and is home to 2.4 million registered voters, could only offer one place for voters to return their ballots. The state of Rhode Island, which is smaller than Harris county, will have more drop-off locations this year.

“The forces that were fine with poll taxes and literacy tests are the same kinds of forces that are equally comfortable in the 21st century with ‘targeting African Americans with almost surgical precision’ in voter IDs and requiring extra hurdles to cast an absentee ballot in the midst of a global pandemic,” said Carol Anderson, a professor at Emory University in Atlanta who has written extensively about voter suppression, in an email.

Hard to vote here? Proof of residency isn't hard.

My wife and I voted last Thursday. Took one minute in line (literally), about 3 minutes to vote, 1 minute to run it my ballot thru the machine... 5 minutes, from parking my car to starting it up again

[46zilzal]

Originally Posted by ElKabong

Hard to vote here? Proof of residency isn't hard.

My wife and I voted last Thursday. Took one minute in line (literally), about 3 minutes to vote, 1 minute to run it my ballot thru the machine... 5 minutes, from parking my car to starting it up again

I was at the early polling place one hour and 43 minutes

[ElKabong]

Originally Posted by 46zilzal

I was at the early polling place one hour and 43 minutes

Stay in California.

[ElKabong]

People that voted in Texas the first day or 2 of early voting had long lines. If you wait out the first 3 days it's very fast

[oughtoh]

When I dropped my ballot off on Monday, people were saying the wait was 1 1/2 hours, but none of them were leaving. In the 70's I use to wait for over an hour to vote, maybe it took that long back them because you had to show I.D.

[46zilzal]

Originally Posted by ElKabong

Stay in California.

I don't live there